A Familial Zoo Story

Me, Myself & I, currently being performed at Playwrights Horizons, is the most highly pedigreed version of “Who’s on First?” ever produced. Edward Albee’s 30th play is a tangled mess of repetitions and mistaken identities, performed to a farethewell.

One of those absurdist plays (“Experimental theater,” my companion said to me during intermission. “Didn’t we decide the experiment had failed?”), Me, Myself & I is about the power of language and the need to escape one’s parents. That’s just below the surface, though. What director Emily Mann most vividly emphasizes is the dullness of incessant wordplay, beginning with Albee’s character’s names.

Twenty-eight years ago, Mother (Elizabeth Ashley) gave birth to twin boys. She named one OTTO and one otto. Because they’re twins and “otto” is a palindrome. Get it? Don’t worry if you don’t; Albee will explain it to you. A lot. And in depth. Anyway, loud OTTO (Zachary Booth) has decided that soft otto (Preston Sadler) no longer exists, which comes as a surprise to otto, Mother, otto’s girlfriend Maureen (Natalia Payne) and Mother’s Dr., played by Brian Murray with a rubbery-faced abandon. This relatively simple statement has complicated consequences, of course, since words have lethal powers in Albee’s meta-theatrical world, and soon everyone is telling otto that he doesn’t actually exist.

With some slashing, Me, Myself & I could be a funny and biting romp, but at over two hours, Mann’s production drags on and on. But Ashley, in a personal triumph, single-handedly turns the show into something worth seeing. As one of Albee’s typical monstrous mothers, she’s exasperating and hilarious, blowsy and confused. She can’t tell her sons apart, but that doesn’t stop her from yammering on to either of them. In her mouth, Albee’s complicated language feels less like the vicious imposition of a stuttering sadist and more like a grab bag of barely related clichés, stopgaps and circular logic scraped from the bottom of a mental well.

Booth is a charming sociopath, flashing deep dimples when OTTO is at his worst (and shucking his clothes in the second act for a flash of much-needed physicality in the midst of so much high-flying philosophy), but Sadler seems entirely out of place, and unrelated to anyone else on the stage. Likewise, Payne seems to be interacting with the rest of the cast from behind a sheet of glass. Performing an underwritten character (as opposed to the rest of the overwritten ones here), she’s no match for Ashley in their complicated duet. And Murray, with his slow burns, feels like a holdover from a vaudeville production of the play.

Luckily, there’s always Ashley to turn to. Her performance becomes something of a double exposure, as both the character and the actress struggle for clarity in a world gone mad. We can feel Ashley using every trick in her considerable arsenal to keep the audience engaged in what quickly becomes a linguistics game, just as Mother babbles on to keep confusion at bay, for herself if for no one else. Me, Myself & I may refer to OTTO and his twins (yes, plural, but that’s beside the point), but it becomes a reference to Mother, Ashley and the delicious merging of the two.

Me Myself & I

Through Oct. 31, Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; $75.