Edward Albee

From Philosopedia.org

Albee, Edward (12 March 1928— )

Albee is an eminent American dramatist and theatrical producer. He is known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962, in which he examines illusion and reality with a witty dialogue that portrays a not very happy married couple and their marriage.

Youth

Abandoned at birth by his natural parents, he was adopted by millionaires Frances and Reed Albee who, according to his biography by Mel Gussow, paid $133.30 for him. He was named after a paternal grandfather, Edward Franklin Albee, a theatrical manager who, as the general manager of the Keith-Albee theatre circuit, was "the most influential person in vaudeville in the United States. A circus ticket seller when he joined Benjamin Franklin Keith in 1885 to establish the Boston Bijou Theatre, he was responsible for the expansion of the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. By the 1920s it controlled nearly 400 theatres in the East."

Albee was raised by his adoptive and affluent parents in New York City and nearby Westchester County. A rebellious child, according to Gussow's Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, a Biography (1999), Albee when 12 was enrolled at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and was dismissed when 15 for cutting classes. His father then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy, where he was dismissed also. From 1944 to 1946 he attended Choate, graduating in 1946. A prolific writer in high school, he shocked school officials by writing a three-act sex farce entitled Aliqueen. In 1945, a Texas literary magazine, Kaleidoscope, published his poem "Eighteen," and when a senior his first published play, Schism, appeared in the school's literary magazine.

Upbringing

Frances Albee reared Edward with the intention of his becoming a respectable and conservative New Yorker. He was taken to afternoon matinees in the family's Rolls Royce. He took riding lessons. In the summer he learned to sail on Long Island Sound. In the winter he vacationed in Miami. His mother was not pleased by his associating with artists and intellectuals and acting in plays at the Trinity College, which dismissed him for failing to attend chapel and some of his classes.

When he moved to Greenwich Village at the age of 20, his mother reportedly was not pleased and objected strongly. He supported himself with a job at Radio WNYC, writing music programming, living on the proceeds of his grandmother's trust fund.

He briefly enrolled in classes at Washington University and Columbia University, but never graduated.

The Zoo Story

Albee during a rehearsal break at Second Stage Theater of The Zoo Story, sitting on the bench that figures so prominently in the play

Albee held jobs as a record salesman, an office boy, and a Western Union employee. While living on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village and working for the telegraph company, he "borrowed" a tele-typing machine in order to write his first play, The Zoo Story (1958). The machine only had capital letters, and he reportedly spent less than a month to write the one-act work.

It described an isolated young homosexual (Jerry) who interrupts a publishing executive (Peter) who is reading on a bench in New York City's Central Park, saying, "I've been to the zoo!" Not particularly interested, Peter finds it difficult to continue reading and little by little has to hear details of Jerry's life, how he hates the world he finds he is in as well as the world he inhabits with others. He stays in a rooming house with a bizarre landlady whose ugly dog he attempts unsuccessfully to poison - Peter senses trouble and decides he is no longer interested in Jerry's life or his problems. Agitated, Jerry becomes unruly, throws Peter a knife, challenges him to fight, and one of the two illustrates the limits of absurdity and where it can lead. An innocent middle-aged stranger is tragically tricked, and viewers differ as to what it all means.

The play, which a New York producer could not be found to show it, was first produced in Berlin. Successful there, the play was produced by Alan Schneider in an off-Broadway double bill along with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, an equally absurd play during which Krapp listens to old tape recordings of a young, foolish, and naive stranger.

Albee and Beckett became known as practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd, 1950s and early 1960s writers illustrating Albert Camus's view that the human situation is devoid of purpose, is essentially absurd.

Salman Rushdie has written that when he performed as an actor on Pakistani TV in Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959), he had to cut a line about God’s being a colored queen who wears a kimono, plucks His eyebrows, and indifferently files His nails.

(See entry for Albee's Sophomore Friend.)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Albee in 1962

In 1962, his three-act play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, portrayed how gruesome married life can be. A middle-aged couple (George and Martha) join a biology professor (Nick) and his wife (Honey) in a drunken get-together and the two couples reveal their complex, unhappy, and disturbing lives. For one thing, the couples have no children and are tied to their parents. They indulge in insults and humiliations, heightened by witticisms that hurt. The older couple has a fixation about a nonexistent son, one the couple invented in order, in Albee's view, "to try to claw our way into compassion. By exorcising this fixation, they are shown to achieve a catharsis by facing up to the truth, standing together to face reality, and bringing a noisy play to a quiet ending. Called a tragi-comedy of academe, it caught critics' attention with its descriptions of frustration, domestic anguish, and sexual fantasy.

Martin Seymour-Smith, in Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature (1976), wrote that this, a most successful play by a misogynist,

• is a clever amalgam of more traditional influences: the sensationalism of O'Neill, Strindberg, and others seems to be structurally modified by absurdism, but the play's basic message is that women are horrible, mad, and dangerous.

Other Works

Albee with Tennessee Williams

James D. Hart, in Oxford Companion to American Literature, has given thumbnail descriptions of various Albee works:

The Sandbox (1960) has a usually active Grandma who is symbolically left by a couple (Mommy and Daddy) who are tired of her and leave her alone on a beach, where a young man (symbolically representative of Death) picks her up.

The American Dream (1961) is a grotesque and satiric comedy about a middle-class Mommy and Daddy who tortured their adopted son to death because he seemed unlikely to row up into the clean-cut "American Dream" type of young man.

The Death of Bessie Smith (Berlin, 1960; New York, 1961) tells of the agony of a black blues singer who dies after an auto accident and in involved in a fight involving a nurse, an intern, and and orderly in the all-white hospital to which she is brought.

Tiny Alice (1965) is a fantasy of wealth and of corruption, a symbolic dream play that presents the richest woman in the world corrupting a Catholic lay brother, whom she seduces, marries, and arranges to have murdered.

In 1963, Albee joined with two friends in creating an absurdist group called "Theater 1964," which produced, among other things, Beckett's Play and Pinter's The Lover at Cherry Lane Theatre. After Malcolm closed after only five days, Albee rebounded with the success of A Delicate Balance in 1966. For this play, he received the Pulitzer Prize.

Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, he continued to write. Everything in the Garden, adapted from a play by Giles Cooper, was produced in 1967, followed by the original plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung in 1968, All Over in 1971, and Seascape in 1975. For Seascape, Albee was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize. Counting the Ways and Listening which initially debuted as a radio play in England was staged in New York in 1977.

Throughout the 1980's, Albee's playwriting career did not produce a commercial hit. Plays from this period include The Lady from Dubuque (1980), an adaptation of Lolita (1981), The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983), Finding the Sun (1985), and Marriage Play (1987). During this time, Albee also taught courses at various universities and maintained his residence in New York.

In 1994, Albee experienced a much-awaited success with Three Tall Women, one that earned Albee his third Pulitzer Prize and his first commercial hit in over a decade. The play also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

In 1993, he wrote Lorca Play and in 1995 Fragments: A Concerto Grosso.

In 2008, his Edward Albee's Occupant opened in New York City. The two-character play imagines what an afterlife interview would be like with sculptor Louise Nevelson, Albee's friend for over two decades and who died at the age of 88 in 1988. She tells of an unhappy childhood, a bad marriage, and an uninspiring role as a mother but always one with a love of art. In the absurdist work, Albee brings up how unreliable memory can be and how truth and illusion figure in people's defining their lives.

Honors

His biggest award came in 1966, when he was elected to the prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1980 he received the Institute's Gold Medal in Drama. When the Institute merged with the Academy, he became one of the 250 members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After winning a Pulitzer Prize for A Delicate Balance (1967), he was granted a D. Litt. that year from Emerson College. In 1974 he was granted a D. Litt. from Trinity College.

In 1996 he was feted by President Bill Clinton in the White House and received the 1996 National Medal of Arts Award.

Albee, who has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for 40 years, in 2006 gave the prestigious Blashfield Address at the Academy's 156th Street Auditorium, reportedly one of the wittiest and most polished lectures in members' memory.

Advice to A High School Sophomore

At an interview with Marian Seldes on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Albee spoke with satisfaction and humility about his life as a playwright, after which he wittily answered questions from the hundred who had come to hear him at Lincoln Center in New York City.

As he was exiting, a Washington Irving High School sophomore in New York City - Ligardy Termonfils - approached and asked Albee if he knew that Salman Rushdie had played the part of Jerry in a Pakistan television production of Zoo Story.

For an account of the correspondence that ensued, click.

Views

In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, has a line,

• I swear to GOD, George, if you even EXISTED, I'd divorce you.

Albee told Warren Allen Smith that he is a nominal Quaker who admires the group’s pacifism, that he thinks Jesus lived, that he is interested in Jesus’s outlook, that he does not know about secular humanism, and that although he likes Christianity he does not accept “all that divinity stuff.”

Personal

Jonathan Thomas and Albee

In April 2005, Albee's companion - Ontario-born Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor who exhibited widely in North America - died of bladder cancer. .

Works

The Zoo Story (1958)

The Death of Bessie Smith (1959)

The Sandbox (1959)

Fam and Yam (1959)

The American Dream (1960)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961-62,

Tony Award, Grammy Award in 1964 in the Best Documentary,

Spoken Word or Drama Recording (Other Than Comedy) category)

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963)

(adapted from the novella by Carson McCullers)

Tiny Alice (1964)

Malcolm (1965)

(adapted from the novel by James Purdy)

A Delicate Balance (1966) Pulitzer Prize

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966)

(musical, adapted from the novella by Truman Capote)

Everything in the Garden (1967)

(adapted from a play by British playwright Giles Cooper)

Box (1968)

All Over (1971)

Seascape (1974)

Pulitzer Prize

Listening (1975)

Counting the Ways (1976)

The Lady From Dubuque (1977-79)

Lolita (1981)

(adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov)

The Man Who Had Three Arms (1981)

Finding the Sun (1982)

Marriage Play (1986-87)

Three Tall Women (1990-91)

Pulitzer Prize

The Lorca Play (1992)

Fragments (1993)

The Play About the Baby (1996)

The Goat or Who is Sylvia? (2000)

Tony Award

Occupant (2001)

Knock! Knock! Who's There!? (2003)

Peter & Jerry (Act One: Homelife. Act Two: The Zoo Story) (2004)

Me Myself & I ( (2007)

Edward Albee's Occupant (2008)

Selected Works About

Bigsby, C.W.E., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Cohn, Ruby. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969.

Debusscher, Gilbert. Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal. Trans. by Anne D. Williams. Brussels: American Studies Center, 1967.

Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

MacNicholas. Twentieth Century American Dramatists Part 1: A-J, Gale Research Co., 1981.

Roudane, Matthew C. “Edward Albee.” American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance. Ed. Philip C. Kolin. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Rutenberg, Michael E. Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest. New York: DBS Publications, Inc., 1969.

(See entry for Absurdism.)

{AA; CE; FFRF; TRI; TYD; WAS, 10 December 1996}