Review: Angst, humor and lizards heighten ‘Seascape’ at Role Players Ensemble

Two couples meet on a lonely beach. As strangers, they’re wary of each other but also fascinated, and the often difficult conversation they have brings out into the open their deepest insecurities. Oh, and one of the couples happens to be giant lizards from deep beneath the ocean.

That’s the unnerving setup of “Seascape,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1975 play by Edward Albee that Role Players Ensemble is now performing in Danville as part of this year’s Eugene O’Neill Festival (which concludes with O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” at Tao House later in September). Like many Albee plays, “Seascape” features a squabbling couple in late middle age with a tendency to pick apart each other’s word choices. Unlike most, it also features lizard people.

Director George Maguire’s staging starts off fairly laid-back, as if to lull the audience before startling them later on. The whoosh of waves and cries of seagulls in Adam Wayne Gistarb’s sound design greet you as you enter the Danville Village Theatre, though there’s no ocean visible in Giulio Perrone’s set, just a desert landscape with a few tufts of tall grass and pieces of driftwood.

Nancy and Charlie are a newly retired couple whose kids are grown, and the question of what to do next is dredging up old wounds in their marriage. Aaron Murphy’s Charlie is terse and condescending, while Christine Sheppard’s Nancy is garrulous and upbeat yet relentless in demanding that Charlie decide right now what they’re going to do with their lives. Every now and then the conversation turns nasty, as Albee conversations often do, but it’s also clear that they’d be lost without each other, even if they’re a little lost together as well.

Their increasingly melancholy exchanges picking apart their lives together does get wearying in the first act, so it’s a breath of fresh air when the lizard people come. Samantha Behr and Kyle Goldman are wonderfully compelling as the cheery Sarah and surly Leslie, with an amusingly down-to-earth, humanlike speech but crouching, crawling, eerily animalistic movements. Their glistening green costumes by Barbara “B.J.” Bandy-Rosado potently heighten the effect.

The cross-species conversation that ensues is tense and funny and often barbed, as attempts to explain the human experience bring some of the absurdities of human existence into stark relief. For all its weirdness and humor and semi-fantastical premise, it’s a bittersweet piece, tinged with nameless unease and fraught with existential dread. And it’s a wonderfully offbeat and challenging play for a suburban community theater to be doing, which in itself is a fine reason to welcome the lizard people with open arms — even if you have to explain to them what arms are.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.