Edward Albee

Playwright

• Born: March 12, 1928
• Birthplace: Washington, DC
• Died: September 16, 2016
• Place of death: Montauk, New York

Biography

Few American playwrights revealed an anger as sharp and sustained as that of Edward Albee (AL-bee) or imposed such great emotional demands on audiences. When he is compared with such contemporary absurdist playwrights as Jack Gelber, Jack Richardson, Kenneth Brown, and Arthur Kopit, Albee is generally shown to be the most challenging and searching among them. His particular talent lay in writing plays in which human emotions alternate drastically at such breakneck speed that audiences, emotionally drained by what they experience, nevertheless emerge with a renewed vision of human relationships, though self-knowledge remains elusive.

Edward Franklin Albee was born somewhere in Virginia and, before he was two weeks old, was taken to Washington, DC, where his parents gave him up for adoption to Reed and Frances Cotter Albee of Larchmont, New York. Reed Albee, part owner of Keith-Albee Theaters, was wealthy, so Edward was reared in a privileged atmosphere. One of his early pastimes was attending matinees of Broadway plays. He came into contact, too, with the theater people who were frequent guests of his adoptive parents.

An indifferent student, Albee attended private schools. He left Trinity College after studying there for one and a half years. For the next decade, he lived in Greenwich Village on the income from a small trust fund, supplementing this income with paychecks from menial jobs. While he was working as a Western Union messenger, Albee met poet W. H. Auden, who encouraged his writing, as had his high-school teachers a decade earlier.

At thirty, Albee reassessed his life and decided to redirect it. He spent three weeks writing the brief The Zoo Story, which remains one of his most celebrated plays. It is a minimalist, absurdist drama, simply set, using only two characters, Peter and Jerry. Jerry lures Peter into a fight and dies on Peter’s knife, ironically a gift from Jerry. The language and sense of confinement the play projects are intense and deliver an impact like that of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play Huis clos (No Exit, 1947).

Albee carried the same minimalist effects into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play which has been performed around the world, was popularized through a film version, and undoubtedly belongs to the classic repertory of the twentieth century. George, a history professor, and his wife, Martha—named for George and Martha Washington—entertain a new faculty couple, Nick (a biologist) and Honey, in their home during a prolonged evening of drinking. The tensions of this long play are heightened by the confinement of the set itself, a living room in which the past (history, a humanistic outlook) is pitted against the future (biology, a scientific outlook). Raucous Martha, several years George’s senior, ineffectually seduces Nick, while George extracts personal secrets from Honey. Emotionless Nick and timid Honey are childless, but George and Martha have long nurtured the creation of a fictional child, their “bumble of joy” (a term which may reflect Albee’s self-image as a foundling), a dream which Martha savagely destroys in the course of the evening.

The Sandbox and The American Dream, one-act plays, have identical casts of characters modeled on Albee’s adoptive parents and on his maternal grandmother Cotter. Both plays expose an antiseptic and emotionless society that values appearances only, while the satirical Fam and Yam makes interesting comments on modern theater. “Fam” refers to “Famous American” writers, “Yam” to “Young American” writers.

Albee received Pulitzer Prizes in drama for A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women. Also significant is Tiny Alice, a Faustian play with a twist. Church administrators barter lay brother Julian’s soul, sacrificing Julian to Miss Alice in return for a two-billion-dollar gift to the church; the work is somewhat reminiscent of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956). Albee adapted Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), James Purdy’s Malcolm (1959), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) for the stage, imposing on himself an artistic discipline he believed he needed. The McCullers adaptation was the most successful of the three.

Three Tall Women, which had its American premiere in New York City in 1994, is based on portraits of Albee’s adoptive mother at three ages: as a young adult, at middle age, and in old age. Albee admits to not having liked his adoptive mother very much, finding it difficult to abide her loathings and her paranoias—while at the same time admiring her pride, self-possession, and survival instinct. Three Tall Women epitomizes an important aspect of a number of Albee’s plays, namely that the female characters function as blazing sources of energy (in the words of critic Ben Brantley, they both “nurture” and “scorch”), while the male characters tend to stammer, hedge, or wilt. Albee’s drama pulses with tensions inherent in conflicting desires, moral dilemmas, and the double-gaming of truth and illusion. He was a master of language and absurd humor, whose dialogue ignites uneasy but compassionate repartee between married couples, ethnic communities, generations, and divergent social classes.

By 2004, Albee stated in interviews that he had been considering expanding upon The Zoo Story for decades. When the Hartford Stage theater commissioned him to return to the story, he wrote a prequel act titled Homelife to be paired in performance with The Zoo Story. These two acts were first premiered together as the play Peter and Jerry in 2004. In recognition of his eightieth birthday, he wrote his final play, Me, Myself & I, for premiere at New Jersey's McCarter Theatre in 2008. This work focuses on the lives of identical twin brothers and the theme of identity.

Following a brief illness, Albee died at his home in Montauk, New York, at the age of eighty-eight, on September 16, 2016.

Author Works

Drama:

The Zoo Story, pr., pb. 1959

The Death of Bessie Smith, pr., pb. 1960

The Sandbox, pr., pb. 1960

Fam and Yam, pr., pb. 1960

The American Dream, pr., pb. 1961

Bartleby, pr. 1961 (libretto, with James Hinton, Jr.; music by William Flanagan; adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, pr., pb. 1962

The Ballad of the Sad Café, pr., pb. 1963 (adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel)

Tiny Alice, pr. 1964

A Delicate Balance, pr. 1966

Malcolm, pr., pb. 1966 (adaptation of James Purdy’s novel)

Everything in the Garden, pr. 1967 (adaptation of Giles Cooper’s play)

Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, pr. 1968 (2 one-acts)

All Over, pr., pb. 1971

Seascape, pr., pb. 1975

Counting the Ways, pr., pb. 1977

Listening, pr., pb. 1977

The Lady from Dubuque, pr., pb. 1980

Lolita, pr. 1981 (adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel)

The Man Who Had Three Arms, pr., pb. 1982

Finding the Sun, pr. 1983

Marriage Play, pr. 1987

Three Tall Women, pr. 1991

The Lorca Play, pr. 1992

Fragments: A Sit Around, pr. 1993

The Play About the Baby, pr. 1998

The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia?, pr., pb. 2002

Occupant, pr. 2002

Peter and Jerry, pr. 2004

Me, Myself & I, pr. 2008

Bibliography

Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Taking Albee’s career through The Man Who Had Three Arms, this study is part biography, part script analysis, and part career assessment. Amacher is best at discussing Albee’s “place in the theatre” and his marriage of the well-made play form with the formless Theater of the Absurd. Good second opinion after C. W. E. Bigsby’s edition of essays in 1975. Chronology, notes, bibliography.

Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. This collection includes notable names in theater and scholarship, such as Gerald Weales, Martin Esslin, Richard Schechner, Alan Schneider, Harold Clurman, Philip Roth, and Robert Brustein. They contribute several interpretations of the symbolic aspect of Albee’s plays, usually, but not always, in single-play discussions.

Bottoms, Stephen J. Albee: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A thorough study of Albee’s best-known play.

Bottoms, Stephen J. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. A comprehensive survey of Albee’s works, presented through easy-to-read essays. Recommended for new readers of Albee, as well as scholars of his work.

Bryer, Jackson R. “Edward Albee.” In The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Interview conducted in 1991 that discusses most of Albee’s major plays at the time, both successes and failures. Albee reveals himself as clever and articulate as the characters in his plays, and he makes pointed statements about the Broadway establishment and its impact on playwriting in America.

Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. A comprehensive biocritical study of the playwright by a leading cultural critic of The New York Times, whose association with Albee extends back to 1962. Written with Albee’s cooperation and input, it discusses all of his plays in the context of his life and his beliefs as an artist. With photos, bibliography, and index.

“Edward Albee.” In Playwrights at Work. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Although this interview appeared in the Paris Review in 1966, when Albee had taken several critical hits in the wake of his success with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it captures him in the full flush of his “angry young man” interval and records observations on the art and craft of playwriting that continue to inform his work.

Kolin, Philip C., and J. Madison Davis, eds. Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. This collection of original reviews (from The Zoo Story to Counting the Ways), general criticism, and an overview of Albee’s importance to world theater is comprehensive and thorough, with some thirty-seven articles, as well as an annotated bibliography of Albee interviews (with its own index).

McCarthy, Gerry. Edward Albee. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Stronger than other studies on Albee’s theater sense, as opposed to his plays as dramatic literature, this brief but informative overview puts the work in a dynamic, action-and-reaction-oriented structural perspective. Some production stills, index, and brief bibliography.

Mann, Bruce J. Edward Albee: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2003. Scholarly study of some of Albee's major works.

Nayar, Rana. Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships. New Delhi, India: Prestige Books, 2003. An examination of the complexity of human relations using Albee's plays.

Plimpton, George, ed. “Edward Albee.” In Playwrights at Work. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Although this interview appeared in the Paris Review in 1966, when Albee had taken several critical hits in the wake of his success with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it captures him in the full flush of his “angry young man” interval and records observations on the art and craft of playwriting that continue to inform his work.

Roudané, Matthew. Understanding Edward Albee. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Organized chronologically, and pairing the plays in each chapter (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gets its own), this study focuses on Albee’s plays in a “culture seeking to locate its identity through the ritualized action implicit in the art of theater.” Bibliography and index.

Roudané, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A close study of Albee’s landmark drama, by one of Albee’s most perceptive critics. A follow-up to the author’s Understanding Edward Albee, with particular emphasis on the function and purpose of illusion in Albee’s dramas.

Wasserman, Julian, ed. Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays. Houston: University of St. Thomas, 1983. This 1981 interview, on translations, audiences, and similar earthly subjects, has a show-biz tone to it, without much of the transcendental abstractions of later interviews. A good place to start a study of Albee because he articulates his intentions here with some clarity and grace. Wasserman contributes an essay on language; seven other authors offer single-play discussions, not including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but including The Lady from Dubuque, Seascape, and Counting the Ways.

Weber, Bruce. "Edward Albee, Trenchant Playwright Who Laid Bare Modern Life, Dies at 88." The New York Times, 16 Sept. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/arts/edward-albee-playwright-of-a-desperate-generation-dies-at-88.html. Accessed 9 May 2017. Obituary covering his life and career.

Zinman, Toby. Edward Albee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008. This book provides a chronological examination of Albee’s works, tracing his themes of relationships, death, and the passage of time. An essential guide for anyone interested in Albee’s plays.