TINY ALICE
Albee describes Tiny Alice as a “metaphysical dream play,” and his description is apt, for, like a dream, its meaning exists on two levels. On the surface level, a lawyer for the extremely wealthy Miss Alice visits the cardinal and announces that Miss Alice intends to donate $100 million a year to the church for the next 20 years. The lawyer and the cardinal are fierce rivals who mock and humiliate each other the way George and Martha do in Albee’s best-known play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But the two men eventually reach an agreement–the cardinal will send his assistant, a lay brother named Julian, to work out the details of the gift with Miss Alice.
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Although Julian claims he wants to experience God directly, without the symbolic intermediaries most people rely on to make the abstract concept of a deity easier to grasp, he becomes distraught at the end of the play when he is “married” to the abstraction–to the tiny Alice in the model. “There is nothing there!” Julian screams, longing for Miss Alice–the voluptuous flesh-and-blood symbol of the tiny Alice in the model. In the play’s final moments, as Julian stands dying in a crucifixion pose against the model, he either experiences the abstraction directly, or creates one final self-delusion to help him believe in what he knows doesn’t really exist. Albee specifically leaves the interpretation open.
