THEATER REVIEW : There’s No Simple Code to Break Through Mystery of ‘Tiny Alice’

In the program notes of “Tiny Alice” at North Coast Repertory Theatre, playwright Edward Albee describes his work as “fairly simple.”

Never mind that this three-hour play, which puzzled critics when it opened on Broadway 25 years ago, is a complex portrayal of a man’s struggle with faith in God.

Never mind that it turns on a crucial point of whether a Catholic brother, who cannot make the leap of faith to become a priest, can be forced by three people who represent a triumvirate of money, sex and organized religion to accept the fact that God, under the name of Alice, resides in a doll’s model of a mansion inside a mansion.

Is “Tiny Alice” a philosophical work? Yes. A provocative one? Yes. A simple one? Only to a simpleton.

Perhaps Albee is confusing “Tiny Alice” with the last play the North Coast Rep did about a priest’s struggle with his faith, “To Forgive, Divine.”

In that calculated piece of fluff, which kept rolling over and wagging its tail pathetically in its desire to be loved, a wise-cracking priest agonizes about whether to leave his calling to pursue a former high school love, but then realizes he has more to offer the world as a man of God.

To forgive that one, one would have to be divine.

But “Tiny Alice,” playing at the North Coast through May 28, should serve as redemption for past pandering. This difficult, relentlessly uncommercial work--beautifully produced by North Coast--is a three-hour soul searcher that defies easy analysis. Like Albee’s most famous play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” it moves symbols, like chess pieces, on axes of reality and imagination so deftly that, at any given moment in the action, it is hard to say whether we are seeing something that is really happening to the characters or if we are seeing what the characters are only imagining is happening to them.

The story begins straightforwardly enough with a very rich woman, Miss Alice (Cristina Soria), proposing a grant of $2 billion to the Catholic Church if the local cardinal (Bill Quiett) will allow his assistant, Brother Julian (Brian Salmon), to work out the details of the grant with her.

The outline soon deepens into mystery. Miss Alice, her lawyer (Ocie Robinson) and her butler (Stuart McLean)--whose name is Butler--seem to be hatching some sort of plot that involves the seduction of Brother Julian by Miss Alice.

But beneath this mystery lies another mystery. The lawyer, who stands for money, and the cardinal, who symbolizes the church, seem to be using the charms of the beautiful, flesh-and-blood Alice, who represents sex, to trick Brother Julian into a marriage with the invisible Tiny Alice of the dollhouse, a miniaturized replica of Miss Alice’s mansion (or is Miss Alice’s mansion an enlarged version of Tiny Alice’s mansion?).

Why are they doing this? Is Tiny Alice God? Or do the plotters just believe her to be God? Or is a distant, abstract, invisible God the only kind that Brother Julian, a man still struggling with his faith, can understand? Does the cardinal, ostensibly Julian’s friend, go along with the scheming for the $2 billion (a slight inflation for the 30 pieces of silver Judas received for betraying Jesus)?

Although “Tiny Alice” is often allegorical, there isn’t a simple code one can use to break through the mysteries.

Still, one does not need to comprehend the whole to feel the pathos of the parts. Brother Julian, a self-described servant of God, dreams of a martyrdom that involves Christians being thrown to lions and dying amid the pressing of flesh on flesh. Martyrdom, he is later to learn, is a lonely business in which one is forsaken, and one’s dearest friends, like Brutus to Julius Caesar, deal the fatal blows.

The excellent five-person cast draws sparks under Olive Blakistone’s charged direction. Salmon delivers an aching portrait of Brother Julian, finding in the lay brother a Hamlet who longs to take a course of action only to find that the forces buffeting him are stronger than his own will to order the course of events.

Quiett provides painful balance as the cardinal who is almost sure he is doing the right thing when he sells his saint for gold. Robinson oils his way powerfully through the part of the bullying lawyer. McClean’s butler packs chilling menace into the most superficially pleasant words. And Soria is magnetically irresistible as the black widow spider (dressed in black on the seduction night), who mates with her prey before destroying him.

Leslee Baren’s spacious set suggests an elegant receiving room despite the painted backdrop, which seems an inevitable result of the limitations of North Coast’s production budget.

Michael Shapiro’s sound design puts a nice, spooky spin on religious chants. The lighting, by Sean LaMotte, could be more elaborate given the hallucinatory elements of this play, but it does the job. The costume requirements--the cardinal’s red robes, the lay brother’s cassock--are uncomplicated and designer Kathryn Gould’s choices serve.

“TINY ALICE”

By Edward Albee. Director, Olive Blakistone. Sets, Leslee Baren. Lighting, Sean LaMotte. Costumes, Kathryn Gould. Sound, Michael Shapiro. With Ocie Robinson, Bill Quiett, Brian Salmon, Stuart McLean and Cristina Soria. At 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sundays, with selected Sunday matinees through May 28. At 987D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach.