Boundary-Crossing: A Posthumanist Reading of Edward Albee’s Seascape

Abstract

Edward Albee’s Seascape is a well-crafted Pulitzer Prize-winning play. This two-act play features a recently retired American couple, Charlie and Nancy, who were idling their time on a sun-soaked beach and having a conversation about future plan, and suddenly a lizard-like nonhuman couple Leslie and Sarah, came from undersea to the land. This essay argues that Seascape is pregnant with Posthumanist wisdom with which we might get access to a better understanding of our place on our planet and foster a more harmonious cohabitation with our fellow humans and other species. Albee’s Seascape is a forceful attempt to deconstruct the boundaries that human set up to distinguish themselves from the world and dissolve the anthropocentric dualistic epistemologies that separate land and sea, men and women, and human and nonhuman. The cross-species encounter in Seascape yields to arguments that starkly subvert human’s long-established stereotypical assumptions about themselves, opening up our eyes to see multiplicity and diversity through the prism of Posthumanism.