A mysterious Edward Albee play has resurfaced in L.A. Times theater critic CharlesMcNulty digs into the story behind Albee's “Fam and Yam,” currently playing at Pacific Resident Theatre.
in 2016, as a rising young playwright, a man of impeccable manners who is nonetheless a determined revolutionary, hellbent on toppling the moribund theater establishment.
If Yam is obviously Albee and “Dilemma, Dereliction and Death” a wry substitute for “The Zoo Story,” who is Fam? In his biography of Albee, Mel Gussow reveals that the successful older dramatist is a surrogate for William Inge, the playwright who had a string of Broadway hits in the 1950s, including “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “Picnic,” “Bus Stop” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” all of which were adapted into films .
This list of those to be indicted includes theater owners, producers, backers, unions, critics, directors and, yes, playwrights too. No one seems to be safe from Yam’s fanatical fury, which Albee sends up, parodying the militant excesses of the new wave he was helping to lead. But Albee doesn’t let Yam off the hook, either. The character plays the courtier, but the compliments he dispenses are transparently phony. Yam realizes that he’s on the way up and that Fam is on the way down. And since Fam won’t offer him a helping hand, Yam is more than happy to give him a good push. Jason Downs’ portrayal captures the passive nature of Yam’s aggression.
to Inge, whose tragic suicide in Los Angeles in 1973 followed the free fall of his once-glittering career. Gussow reports in his 1999 biography that Inge was furious after the magazine publication of “Fam and Yam” in 1960. If Albee felt the work was unfair to Inge, it’s doubtful he would have chosen to stage a revised version of the play in the city where Inge had died just a few years earlier. Perhaps Gussow’s biography subsequently changed Albee’s mind, but there’s probably a simpler reason for the play’s fade into obscurity.
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