The kids are all right: frosh find the 'Sun'

Finding the Sun is a rarely performed play by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee—and there are reasons behind its obscurity. It's a one-act that is much less dynamic than The Zoo Story. None of the play's eight characters are quite as compelling as George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play itself isn't even as captivatingly bizarre as Tiny Alice, or his most recent work, The Play About the Baby. Furthermore, with no scene changes, little action outside of conversation, and eight almost equal parts, all of whom spend most of the play onstage, the adventuresome cast that takes on Finding the Sun has few bells and whistles to hide behind. Simply put, if the cast can't hold the audience, no performance of this play can hold water. So, if veteran actors would seem to be a prerequisite to a staging of Finding the Sun, why is this equally funny and painful one-act our 2001 Dramat Freshman Show?

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH Albee is known for such sophisticated dialogue as 'Meow, bitch!''

Simple—to prove the mettle of a group of young but excellent actors. The cast is always the thing in the Freshman Show, the intended launching-point of many a freshman's Yale career, and this is both its appeal and its burden. I should know: occasionally I still get disgruntled recognition from people who don't seem to be able to separate me from the leeching, angry cripple I played in last year's Frosh Show, Marco Polo Sings A Solo. Whereas last year's show probably lost some of the audience in the sheer complexity of John Guare's plot, Finding the Sun will only lose the impatient in Albee's simplicity.

"Ah, we found the sun!" echo the characters as they enter Nick Chapel, converted into a New England beach by set designer Jonathan Bettin, DC '04 (with real sand, no less). Casually, they settle into spots in the sun, but troubling details creep up immediately. Did Benjamin (Jonathan Goodbaum, BR '04) and Daniel (Peter Cellini, DC '04) just embrace each other while their wives weren't looking? Did Daniel's wife Cordelia (Elizabeth Meriwether, TC '04) really invite a bisexual swinger into their house because "It was cheaper than a new playroom?" Is Edmee (Maeve Herbert, DC '04) actually considering seducing her son Fergus (Eric Eagan, TD '04)? Even Gertrude (Nicola Biden, ES '04) and Henden (Omar Christidis, MC '04), a seemingly happy old couple, are tied into the mess by blood: Cordelia is Gertrude's daughter, Daniel is Henden's son.

The dialogues and monologues that make up Finding the Sun are meaningless if the audience isn't curious about what will happen when one character meets another, and the uniformly excellent cast gives the scattered scenes momentum even where Albee fails to create it. Admittedly, there are some flaws: though Goodbaum and Cellini's Benjamin and Daniel deliver the pain of their failed relationship and the fading lies of their marriages, particularly in their scenes together, both actors still seem to be developing their onstage comfort levels. Their discomfort leads to too many downward glances and unnecessary shifting, problems particularly obvious from Nick Chapel's ampitheater seating. More at ease are their wives—as Benjamin's wife Abigail, Lauren Johns, ES '04, carries a desperate yet repressed sadness that grows until the play's depressing but logical climax. Meriwether's Cordelia almost steals this show with a captivating passion and energy that, of course, only masks her self-delusion and doubt. Staring a hole through the audience as she tries to justify her marriage—about which her husband says, "Isn't it nice we're such good friends?" after sex—Meriwether makes her character more frightening by hinting, rather than showing, the emotional wreck underneath Cordelia's lies.

In a play full of troubled people, at least there are two characters with more normal problems on opposite sides of the age scale: 16-year-old Fergus and 70-year-old Henden. Fergus is something of a narrator, engaging the young couples randomly and cutting right through the lies they tell themselves with innocent, naïve questions. Eagan's ability to affect such naïveté with warmth keeps the character as Albee intended. Christidis, on the other hand, delivers Henden's monologue on death with a stateliness and fear far beyond his actual years, making for perhaps the best moment of the play. Don't be fooled: playing an older or younger character is not as easy as Eagan and Christidis make it seem.

No character makes it out of Finding the Sun with his problems resolved, or even improved by the passings of a day at the beach, so if you came out of Leaving Las Vegas ready to grab a revolver, or go to theater to feel better about yourself, renting an Adam Sandler film may be a better idea. Myself, I left Perry So's, CC '04, production like a proud father, congratulating this year's cast while remembering my own. Then I felt very, very old.

Guess the melancholy hit me after all.

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