Review of reviews: Stage

Me, Myself & I

McCarter Theatre, Princeton, N.J.

(609) 258-2787

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★★★

Edward Albee’s plays are frequently depressing, said Peter Filichia in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. But the 80-year-old’s newest effort “offers laugh after laugh” with an absurdist story about a mother and her two identical—and identically named—twins. Michael Esper is gleefully malevolent as the slick-talking, “self-proclaimed ‘evil twin,’” who casually intimidates his insecure sibling, Colin Donnell. Tyne Daly plays the permanently befuddled character known only as Mother, who “alternates between doting and doltish.” You might be confused, too, by a plot that circles around but goes nowhere. It’s an undeniable thrill, though, to watch a brilliant old hand like Albee send up tired theatrical clichés and shoot down shopworn domestic ideals.

“This may be the work of an old master, but it pulses with the enthusiasm” of a young mind, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Me, Myself & I bears some similarities to earlier Albee plays, such as The Marriage Play and The Play About the Baby: All are “fragmented philosophical vaudevilles that turn the most fundamental questions of identity into verbal soft-shoes.” But Albee rarely writes anything this frivolous, and “there’s something endearingly old-fashioned” about his willingness to do anything for a laugh. Wordplay and “antics with semantics” abound, as Albee tosses in jokes about everything from T.S. Eliot to Doublemint gum. Not all the gags land with the same effect, and this production’s rim shots and sudden blackouts occasionally make it seem like a Borscht Belt routine. “Yet I often found myself laughing in deep involuntary barks”—and isn’t that ultimate test of comedy?