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Edward Albee's recent play Tiny Alice seems to be his most controversial, and has generated unusually vitriolic responses from audiences and drama critics. Reactions ranged from the emotional extremism of “all-for-it” to “all-against-it.” I feel that the application of psychoanalytic knowledge can provide answers to the “riddle” of this play. Also, there are some similarities to syncretic Christian history and the story of Jesus.
Tiny Alice opened in New York on December 29, 1964. The characters are: A LAWYER, CARDINAL, LAY BROTHER JULIAN, A BUTLER NAMED BUTLER, MISS ALICE. This play was reputed to be so “puzzling” that the Playbill (15) carried an insert with a review by Max Lerner of the New York Post (14) and a reprint of an article written by a psychiatrist which the editors of the Saturday Review (9) requested, “because of widespread puzzlement over apparent psychological implication of Edward Albee's latest play.”
Albee says (9): “I think the play started a couple of years ago when I read a small news item about someone in Germany who had been kept in a room within a room.”
The play is presented—or unravelled—engrossingly, as it unfolds in the manner of a skillfully-told detective story. Perhaps, Albee has progressed from venting his overwhelming parental and maternal spleen as manifested in his earlier plays and is ready to look inside himself to see “what happened to me and what can I do about it.” I feel that in this play he has written-out a fascinating and moving representation of the oedipal conflict—the greatest “whodunit” in human history. One further word: Tiny Alice is only the title of the play. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland there are two Alices. “Miss Alice” is the mortal agent for the “Alice” who lives in the model castle; and this “Alice” is an abstraction which becomes