Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...right to fail is honored more often than not. Ever since the success of Virginia Woolf in 1962, Edward Albee has exercised this right annually. Tiny Alice, The Ballad of the Sad Café, A Delicate Balance, Malcolm, Everything in the Garden, and now Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-tung represent the alarming deterioration of a formidable talent...
Albee's characters have never been quite believable, but he used to have a fine knack for making their hostilities waspishly real. His weakness has been an inability to spin a plot, which is why he has adapted and borrowed so much. In Box-Mao he tries to make a virtue out of that weakness by eliminating any narrative whatsoever. The resulting story vacuum masquerades as an experiment in abstraction...
After this, the box is supplied with a raised platform so that it seems like the sun deck of an ocean liner. On it sit and stand four characters. One is Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Wyman Pendleton), who mouths Marxist-Leninist platitudes about the irreparable decline of the imperialist West. Another character is a decayed society drone (Nancy Kelly) who recalls her frustrated attempt at suicide together with such intimate details of her sex life as the smooth tautness of her husband's scrotum. Another woman (Sudie Bond) recites the doggerel couplets of a poem called Over the Hill...
...Each speaker seems to be addressing himself, a form of alienation that succeeds wonderfully in alienating the audience. It may be that Albee had in mind Walter Pater's dictum that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." The kind of music one gets in Box-Mao is the dead space between notes...
...Stones" appears plainly, as do the title of the album, Beggars' Banquet, and the names of the tunes it contains. Scrawled in smaller letters are sly references by the Stones to themselves and their friends, as well as such phrases as "God rolls his own" and "Lyndon loves Mao," plus a bit of familiar bathroom doggerel...