Seascape is a play by the US playwright Edward Albee. It won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. A play is a common form of literature, usually consisting chiefly of dialog between characters, and usually intended for performance rather than reading. ... ... A playwright is someone who writes for the theatre. ... Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is a leading American playwright known for intelligent, well-crafted and often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. ... 1974 is a common year starting on Tuesday (click on link for calendar). ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-04-13, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...

With Seascape, American playwright Edward Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize for drama. Albee himself directed the original Broadway production, which opened on January 26, 1975, at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre. During 2005 the play has been showing at the Music Booth Theater in a production from the Lincoln Center Theater.

Like many of Albee's plays, Seascape focuses on communication in interpersonal relationships, in this case between couples. Albee's first successful play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and his first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, A Delicate Balance (1966), also concerned this topic. Seascape is different from these dramas on several counts. Seascape is not strictly a drama but, according to various critics, has elements of comedy, fantasy, satire, and/or absurdism. In Seascape, Nancy and Charlie, an American couple on the verge of the major life change of retirement, are having problems in their relationship. They are discussing these matters on the beach when another couple appears, two human-sized lizards named Leslie and Sarah who speak and act like people. The lizards have evolved to such a degree that they no longer feel at home in the sea and are compelled to seek life on the land. What the lizards experience with Nancy and Charlie nearly drives them back to the sea, but with an offer of help from the human couple, they decide to stay.

This relatively happy ending is not common in many of Albee's previous plays, and some critics find it refreshing. Before Albee won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Seascape (1975), however, many critics reacted negatively to the first production. Only a few had generally positive responses. One was Clive Barnes of the New York Times who writes, "What Mr. Albee has given us here is a play of great density, with many interesting emotional and intellectual reverberations." The Nation"s Harold Clurman places Seascape in a positive context in terms of Albee's development as a playwright. He believes, "It is his most relaxed play, a 'philosophical' whimsy.