HE SAID, SHE SAID.(Counting the Ways)(Theater Review)

For many years after the phenomenal success of his magisterial early work, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962), the playwright Edward Albee suffered a critical reversal of fortune. Audiences that had delighted in the arch-anarchy that Albee expressed in his first one-act plays, such as "The Zoo Story" (1960) and "The Death of Bessie Smith" (1961), felt that the author's promise had been more than fulfilled by "Woolf," which was his first full-length play. In it, Albee unveiled a brutal--and brutalizing--deeply verbal, and emotionally deceptive world in which he reinvented Arthur Miller's "realism" and Tennessee Williams's lyricism by taking each a step further. Albee exposed the truth in lies, and the lies we cannot live without.

The first Broadway run of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" ended in 1964, when Albee was thirty-six. In his subsequent plays--brilliant theatrical innovations ranging from "Tiny Alice" (1964) to "The Play About the Baby" (2000)--he delved deeper into the themes he had earlier established as his own: marriage as an illusion that does nothing to dispel one's essential fear, anger, and loneliness; maternal love as a smiling trap that, upon closer inspection, reveals gnashing teeth. Critics began to be put off. They complained that Albee's post-"Woolf" work was vague, out of focus, or confused--variations on themes that should have grown stale for Albee (as they had for his audience).

But time generally reveals what fools we mortals be, and certainly when it comes to our artists. Now Albee has been embraced by his detractors for having survived as a highly literate, skilled writer, in an atmosphere of intellectual blight. In recent years, he has been the recipient of many honors (his 2002 play, "The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia?," won the Tony for best play). But Albee's style remains little understood, despite the accolades.

His 1976 one-act play, "Counting the Ways" (at the Century Center), which concludes the "Beckett/Albee" program, opens on a brightly lit sitting room. Two high-backed chairs, covered in crisp white linen, stand on either side of a white oval table. Upstage, two white door frames indicate the room's wall. This is where She (Marian Seldes) and He (Brian Murray) engage in and play out the kind of exchange that constitutes the repetition at the heart of marriage--indeed, at the heart of coupling of any kind. Opening the door to the marital arena, Seldes asks, in the cheeriest of voices, "Do you love me?" And they're off:

He: Hm? Pardon?, She: Do you love me?, He: Why do you ask?, She: Well, because I want to know., He: Right now?, She: Well . . . yes. Or . . . no, no, not really. (Short pause.) Yes., He: Of course., She: Well . . . good.

Then the scene goes black. As played by the incomparable Seldes and Murray, He and She don't exactly spar, but they do jostle. (The actors have been directed with great subtlety and care by Lawrence Sacharow.) They're a well-bred, upper-middle-class Punch and Judy, wielding verbal bats, who are conducting an inquiry into the human heart almost as if neither of them had one--or as if they'd repressed it for the sake of glittering repartee. Or are they really talking about possession? (Albee has said that he admires Noel Coward. It must have amused him to throw blood on the walls of Coward's drawing-room comedies.) As with many of Albee's overintellectualizing couples, Seldes is the instigator of action, while Murray prefers to sit in silence, in the not-so-easy chair of reflection. The "drama" lies in each character's trying to convert the other to his way of being. The futility of this--the antagonistic forces of need and resistance--leaves them frustrated and evasive.

Seldes wants to know, over and over, whether Murray loves her, but he can't even remember how many ...