Less Isn't More if It's "Tiny"

In the Cardinal’s garden, there are two chairs, one for His Eminence and the other for his visitor, the Lawyer. They’ve known each other since school, agree that they’d always detested each other, and banter about each other’s flaws until the Lawyer gets down to business.

His fabulously wealthy client, Miss Alice, will give the Church one billion a year for twenty years, but the Cardinal must send his secretary to finalize the arrangements. Their crisp, arch dialogue suggests they’ve had this conversation before, that there is something ritualistic about it. Muted lighting and gloomy music between scene changes reinforce the impression of foreboding.

The Cardinal’s secretary is Brother Julian, a lay brother and an innocent, who arrives at Miss Alice’s mansion in his long brown cassock and meets both Miss Alice (who is not at all as she was described) and Butler. He’s also introduced to Tiny Alice, which is either a large replica or a model of the building they’re in. Everyone at the mansion is respectful of Tiny Alice. Everyone is also curious about the six blank years in Brother Julian’s resume, which he explains as a loss of faith that sent him to seek help in a mental home. He’d had hallucinations, he says. He had also met a woman there who thought she was the Virgin Mary, but whose pregnancy was really advanced cancer.

After the Lawyer and Miss Alice confer together, the first of two intermissions occurs. Some in the audience leave their seats making wisecracks about needing Cliff Notes. By the second intermission, they’re less forgiving, and by the end, a woman seated nearby was murmuring, “Die, die.” A good pair of scissors could improve this script, but the playwright, Edward Albee, allows no changes in his prose, as A.C.T. found out to its distress in 1975, when he sued them.

Albee wrote the play in 1963, when he was 35 and fresh from his recent success with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Since then, “Tiny Alice” has had a spotty production history, but it now reappears as the closing work in Marin Theatre Company’s 2010 – 2011 season.
Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis states in his program notes that seeing “Tiny Alice” eleven years ago in New York “turned a deep interest in the play into an obsession.” He has directed the MTC production himself and has supplied it with an all-Equity cast, all of them familiar to Bay Area theatergoers.

Andrew Hurteau portrays the hapless, sacrificial Julian, and Rod Gnapp is the menacing Lawyer. Richard Farrell has the part of the complicit Cardinal who, when pleased, forgets to refer to himself as “we.” Carrie Paff plays Miss Alice with seductive and deadly purpose. Mark Anderson Phillips as Butler knows the game, is bored with it, but plays it anyway. Fumiko Bielefeldt costumes this group; Kurt Landisman provides the murky lighting; Chris Houston designs the sound. Scenic designer J.B. Wilson contributes both the set and the Tiny Alice temple.

Marin Theatre Company’s closing play, “Tiny Alice,” will be performed until June 26, every day but Monday. Performance times vary with the days of the week, and ticket prices range from $32 to $53. For complete information, see the website, www.marintheatre.org or call the box office at 388-5208.