There is no shortage of potentially interesting ideas in The Lady from Dubuque, but Anthony Page's revival does not give sufficiently bold direction to turn it into something gripping, strange or creative.
      The first half is a typically Albee awkward middle class party in a modern Connecticut house, which opens with a reluctant game of Twenty Questions ("Don't you just hate party games?"). The dynamic for the entire evening is set: insulting, acerbic banter ("where else can you come in this cold world, week after week, and be guaranteed ridicule and contempt?") fired between a group of unappealing ëfriends' - a couple of up-tight prudes, a red-neck and his latest bimbo ‚ and the hosts, preppy good-guy Sam and his bitter wife Jo, who is in the advanced stages of terminal cancer.
      There are the seeds of interesting themes here. Both halves of the play start with the question "who am I?", a phrase which echoes repeatedly in a play that Albee says is about identity and death. There are several references to being in "two minds" about an issue, or to "two theories" on a problem, and many lines are delivered directly to the audience, as if we too were party guests. Recurring lines about Marx and Engels, to "rights" over spouses and property, and to Richard Nixon suggest that a political point is being made. Yet none of these themes is followed through, and so they seem ultimately merely pretentious.
      Most promisingly, with the entrance of Dame Maggie Smith just before the interval (to an almost audible sigh of relief by the slightly bored audience) with her urbane dapper comic side-kick Oscar (played engagingly by Peter Francis James), there comes a welcome sense of strangeness. Smith plays a character calling herself The Lady from Dubuque (an unknown place in smalltown Iowa) who claims to be Jo's mother. The whole cast starts to believe that she is indeed Jo's mother because she has come to give Jo the comfort and peace that she so desperately needs. But is the audience left floundering: Are we to think that Smith is the Angel of Death? That Oscar somehow usurps Sam, as the Lady takes Jo further from her life with her distraught helpless husband? Or (more probably) that neither Albee nor Page have themselves thought their ideas though.
      This could have been an eerie dislocating exploration of what it is to be real (is the Lady really Jo's mother because she behaves like one and Jo wants her to be, even though she patently is not?). But the audience is not made to care at all about any of the characters (not even the dying Jo nor her bereft husband), nor do we understand why it is that they are all at each other's throats. The result is disengagement rather than dislocation, which is perhaps why this play flopped 27 years ago on Broadway after only 12 performances.
      I came close to sympathizing with one of the party guests "wasn't it all empty, ultimately? Didn't we waste our time?", but the evening is saved as usual by Dame Maggie's twangily ironical performance, but even she seems to be on auto-pilot. The title apparently comes from a remark by the founding editor of The New Yorker, who said his magazine wasn't aimed at the little old lady from Dubuque. I am not sure at whom or what Albee was aiming.
Maya Lester