Jo sure knows how to play party games. “I am your wife, and I am dying,” she snaps at her husband, Sam, during a round of 20 Questions, while their guests look elsewhere. That’s one way to provide entertainment.
The new revival of Edward Albee’s 1980 play “The Lady From Dubuque” may be set in an upscale house filled with fancy art, but the emotions are raw, often brutal. People speak with a jarring coarseness. “Jesus, you can’t ever go take a leak around here!” Carol (Tricia Paoluccio) complains loudly. Her boyfriend, Fred (C.J. Wilson), is a brute. Lucinda (Catherine Curtin) is always several steps behind everybody else, and she gets mocked — by friends and playwright alike — for her stupidity.
The first act seems to set up a sharp-tooth drawing-room comedy, as Jo (Laila Robins) speaks ugly truths to ugly people. Even hubby Sam (Michael Hayden) gets his share despite his devotion. Jo doesn’t care: She’s terminally ill, and gallows humor feels just about right.
But then the title character (the regal Jane Alexander) makes her entrance, late for the party but somehow just on time. And the show takes a hard turn into absurdity.
The lady may or may not be called Elizabeth, and she may or may not be from Dubuque. She also claims to be Jo’s mother, despite Sam’s disbelief. It seems clear that Elizabeth relates to Jo not through life, but through death.
The second act waffles between comic and cruel as Elizabeth and her smooth, urbane sidekick, Oscar (Peter Francis James), upend the household. Oscar turns out to have great combat skills — he paralyzes Sam with a well-placed nerve pinch. That Oscar is black only brings out the worst in the already swinish Fred.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth remains elusive. She dodges questions about her identity and the nature of her visit, but soothes Jo into something approaching serenity — of the final kind.
“The Lady From Dubuque” flopped on Broadway 32 years ago, and one can understand why. It relies on forced situations and straw men, especially since it’s unlikely the discerning, genteel Jo and Sam would befriend such lowbrow caricatures.
But director David Esbjornson has a good touch with Albee — he directed the Tony-winning “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” in 2002 — and makes a good case for this play’s mix of sophistication and crassness, stylization and realism.
You laugh, but you’re uneasy: Life is a roomful of crazies ranging from mediocre to mean, and the only escape is death. That’s not much of a relief.