Edward Albee

Introduction

Considered by some to be the father of the American Theater of the Absurd, Edward Albee’s career resembles that of Herman Melville¾periods of high success, critical and commercial, followed by interludes of harsh criticism and poor audience response (i.e.¾the entire 1980's).  However, Albee has been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, second only to Eugene O’Neill’s four.  If nothing else, his magnum opus, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is the only work which, when presented for the screen, resulted in Academy Award nominations for every starring role.  Ironically, as Albee has noted during interviews, he has recently begun to receive recognition from a society who initially rejected and criticized him.  

Early Years with a 207 lbs. Teenager

Albee was born on Mary 12, 1928 in Washington, DC.  He was adopted at two weeks by Reed and Frances Albee, the former a son of Edward Franklin Albee, of the Keith-Albee vaudeville chain, where the couple would raise him in Westchester, New York.  Albee's early forays into education did not fair well.  At 12, he wrote a three-act satire titled Aliqeen which, due to its theme of sexuality, brought unwanted attention to the child.  Three years later, Albee would be expelled, of all ironies, due to his truancy.  As a result, Albee's parents sent him to Forge Valley Military Academy.  Predictably, he was dismissed in less than a year for undisclosed reasons.  He was then sent back to public school where he underwent a severe bout of depression, which Albee countered with binge eating, resulting in his weight gain climaxing at 207 pounds.  However, in lieu of these dire conflicts with academia, the young Albee displayed an aptitude for literature early on:  He was said, by one instructor, to have "a mature understanding of Shakespeare."  It was during this time he published his first work, a poem entitled "Eighteen" in the school's Kaleidograph.  Nor, did his experience in the arts cease after English was dismissed.  Albee also hosted a record program on the school radio station, where he played Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Brahms, Bach, and Tchaikovsky.  After graduating from Choate, Albee enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford (followed by a brief period at Columbia University) where, during his sophomore year, he was dismissed on the basis of failing to attend Chapel.

New York and the Almost Pornographer

After Trinity, he left for Greenwich Village after a fight with his adopted mother (which was the impetus for a nearly life-long silence between them) where he lived off a $100,000 trust fund established by his grandmother.  It was in 1953 in Greenwich Village is where Albee found his first literary tutor, Thornton Wilder, who told him, after reading the young writer's poetry, that Albee should attempt his hand at pornography or drama.  Thankfully for us, he chose the latter (though some critics would cite that he sways to the former to an excessive degree).  Aside from working various jobs, such as office assistant, record salesman, and as a Western Union messenger (imagine Albee today as a bike messenger!), he was also writing (¾contrary to urban legend):  two novels, nine plays, and hundreds of poems are accounted for during this time. 

Beginning Success and the Bartleby Opera

In 1958, in a measly two weeks, Albee wrote The Zoo Story.  However, he could not locate one New York producer which was willing to stage the work.  He then sent the play to a friend in Europe when the Godfather of the Absurd, Samuel Beckett, was at the peak of his success with Waiting for Godot.  Beckettian director Alan Schneider read Albee's play and agreed to produce it on Off-Broadway.  The play conveyed the alienation and disillusionment of an existential drama yet to be seen by an American playwright atop a minimalist setting (a park bench in Central Park) and further promoted by its seemingly non sequitur theme, which coincided as being one of the signatures of the Theater of the Absurd.  Ironically, The Zoo Story was not the first  piece by Albee to be performed on a professional stage.  Albee wrote the lyrics to the song, "The Lady of Tearful Regret," while his then mentor, William Flanagan composed the score, which was presented at Carnegie Hall in February of 1959.  As an interesting side note (and to many probably not a surprise), during this time Prescott Bush, George Bush Sr.'s father, stood up in Senate and denounced The Zoo Story as "Filthy."  

“The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself.”  ¾Edward Albee

In the years following, Albee further grew as a dramatist via a series of short plays including The Death of Bessie Smith (a presentation of the late blues singer's tribulations upon not being admitted into a hospital due to her race and her death as a consequence), The Sandbox (a satire of the female in the American family, complete with the Angel of Death making an appearance), Fam and Yam (a dialogue between an emerging writer and a distinguished author, reminiscent of Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in its verbal disintegration), and The American Dream (a predecessor to many of his familial works, Albee here slowly enlarging his cast).  However, his first failure occurred (thus establishing a pattern for his adaptations) with a one-act operatic rendition of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” which was due, largely in part, to the author's attempt to set it to music (in the form of an opera nonetheless!).  The same was attempted with Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, resulting in, likewise, dire reviews.  However, from Albee's perspective, his work's singular downfall was primarily accountable to " . . . hav[ing] a lesbian policewoman slug Mary Tyler Moore in the belly in a Broadway musical."  

Becoming One of the Big Four

In lieu of his recent failures, and amid the voices challenging him to a play of more than one-act, Albee presented the world with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  The play's success was manifold:  It shocked audiences, as had all of Albee's American theatric forefathers had done:  O'Neill's presentation of a morphine addict in Long Day's Journey into Night, Williams's depiction of raw sexuality and libido in A Streetcar Named Desire and Miller's  uber-catharsis with Death of a Salesman.  The play depicted uninhibited sexual politics, verbal and physical assaults, spiritual and emotional masochism, and familial disputes, all of which would become motifs in most every work by the playwright thereafter.  One critic stated Virginia Woolf prefaced a new brand of theater which he dubbed the “Theater of Embarrassment.”  Virginia Woolf ran for 664 performances.  At this time, Albee went to the White House and met President Kennedy as part of a "delegation of tastemakers."  When the Pulitzer prize committee did not accept the play's nomination unanimously (on the basis of subject matter and language), two members¾drama critic John Mason Brown and scholar John Gassner¾ resigned (cf. Pynchon and the reception of Gravity's Rainbow).  

Recognition, Decline, and the Volvo Commercial 

After another series of adaptive failures during the first half of the 1960's¾The Ballad of Sad Café, Malcolm, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Everything in the Garden¾Albee was awarded his first Pulitzer for A Delicate Balance in 1966, a play encompassing six characters, focusing on the two hosts of the house whom, upon granting entry to a couple who is "afraid of something," is forced to confront their futile marriage, their four-time divorcée daughter, and the drunken sister.  Some believed the play was inferior to its predecessor and that the award was issued in retribution for Virginia Woolf.  During the same year, the Academy Awarding-winning film adaptation of Virginia Woolf, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, premiered (Bette Davis was Albee's choice to play Martha).  Then, just short of a decade, he was granted his second Pulitzer for Seascape.  Albee stated he researched the works of Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and others in the fields of anthropology and sociology in order to create the work focusing upon evolution and humanity's attitude towards it.  This highly experimental period for Albee also produced All Over (originally titled Death, a meditation by family members alongside a dying male figurehead of the household as they anticipate his passing while the press eagerly awaits downstairs for the news), Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (a play in which Mao Tse-Tung, an old lady, and a minister sit and walk around a box and talk to themselves but never address one another), Listening (a work where a cook, a therapist, and a young woman meet in a garden at an asylum to no effective ends), and Counting the Ways (an homage/satire upon Elizabeth Browning's work, "He" and "She" sit, a married couple, and muse upon life and death, asking one another introductory questions as if they were on a first date).    

Albee then fell prey to a decade-and-a-half of critical and audience disappointment with such plays as The Lady From Dubuque (a Woolf-esque work where three couples discuss one character's cancer amid drinks and cigarettes in a living room setting), Lolita, The Man Who Had Three Arms (a metaphorical self-depiction of a man who was famous because he had a third arm which muses over his 15-minutes after the arm withers away, and thus his fame along with it), Finding the Sun (a play set on the beach where two women meet and discover their husbands were lovers¾ Albee's most overtly homosexual appeal to the subject in any of his works), Walking (a minimalist work composed of an offstage female voice which talks while the audience is presented with a plant and a rock, which was taken off stage by Albee after its first performance), and Marriage Play (a satire in which a husband comes home from work to tell his wife he is leaving her and she refuses to believe him).  Albee would claim the period in which these works were created coincided with his worst experiences with alcohol.  To add to his distress, Albee learned he had diabetes at this time.  In 1985, eager to keep his name alive, Albee accepted a commission to write a commercial for Volvo (which was never aired).  The commercial depicted a Huxleyian future were Volvos would be the preeminent mode of transport.  

Reemergence and Giving Birth to His Dead Mother

To more then one critic's surprise reemerged after he gave "birth" (his words) to Three Tall Women, for which he was awarded his third Pulitzer in 1993.  By far his most autobiographical piece, the work is loosely based on the various periods of his mother's life.  Characters A (in her early nineties), B (what A would have looked like at 52), and C (what B would have looked like at 26) converse about one another and argue about various aspects of life throughout the play.   A character representative of Albee himself makes a cameo appearance during the play in order to visit his dying mother.  This Freudian meditation upon the theme of life and death was highly successful due to Albee placing all three characters one stage at once verses separating them in various acts and scenes.  

The Nineties continued to laud Albee with much overdue recognition.  In 1994, he accepted the Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Theatre; in 1996 he received the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award; and in 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton.  Albee also received honorary doctorates from the University of Houston, State University of New York, and Dartmouth College during this decade.

Present Day and an Award-Winning Affair with a Goat

Albee is currently a member of the Dramatists Guild Council, head of the United States chapter of the International Theater Institute, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He currently is teaching at the University of Houston.  He has written numerous plays since winning his last Pulitzer, including Fragments, The Lorca Plays ( a docu-drama about the poet Federico Garcia Lorca), The Play About the Baby (an echo of Woolf once more where "Man" and "Woman" find that their baby, once present, might not have ever existed), The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (a biting black comedy where a famous architect comes home and reveals to his wife that he is having an affair with a goat¾ which won Albee another Tony Award), The Occupant (another docu-drama focusing on the life of artist Louise Nevelson), and Peter & Jerry (a retelling of The Zoo Story in which the first act has Peter speaking to his wife in their living room followed by the famous confrontation in the second act).

On May 2, 2005, Albee's life partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died.

Works (and Awards)

The Zoo Story (1958, Obie for Off-Broadway and Vernon Rice Award)
The Death of Bessie Smith (1959)
The Sandbox (l959)
Fam and Yam (1959)
The American Dream (1960, Foreign Press Association Award)
Bartleby (1961, Adapted from the short story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" by Herman Melville)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961-62, Tony Award and Drama Critics Circle Award )
The Ballad of Sad Café (1963, Adapted from the novella by the same name by Carson McCullers)
Tiny Alice (1964)
Malcolm (1965, Adapted from the novel by the same name by James Purdy)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966, A musical based on the novel by the same name by Truman Capote)
A Delicate Balance (1966, Pulitzer Prize)
Everything in the Garden  (1967, Adapted from the play by the same name by Giles Cooper)
Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968)
All Over (1971)
Seascape (1975, Pulitzer Prize)
Listening (1975)
Counting the Ways (l976)
The Lady From Dubuque (1977-78)
Another Part of the Zoo (1981)
Lolita  (1981, Adapted from the novel by the same name by Vladimir Nabokov)
The Man Who Had Three Arms (1981-82)
Finding the Sun (1982-83)
Walking (1984)
Marriage Play (1987)
Three Tall Women (1991, Pulitzer Prize, Drama Critics Circle Award, Lucille Lortel Award, London Evening Standard Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award)
Fragments (1993)
The Lorca Plays (1995)
The Play About the Baby (2001)
The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2002, Tony Award) 
The Occupant (2002)
Peter & Jerry (2004)

¾Michael Gurnow, Summer 2005

Links

Libyrinth

Order Albee's works online through Amazon.com by visiting the Libyrinth's Albee Bookstore.

Offsite

Visit the Kennedy Center Honor page for Albee.

Can't see it on the stage?  View Albee on celluloid:  Albee's listing on the Internet Movie Database.

An essay entitled "Allegory in Edward Albee's The American Dream" by Ervin Beck from Goshen College.

An interview with Albee discussing Three Tall Women.

Take the ClassicNotes quiz over Virginia Woolf.

Search ebay for Albee collectibles.  

Utility

Advanced Book Exchange -- Many of Albee books are out of print but most of them can be found used on the Advanced Book Exchange worldwide database of used bookstore inventories.

Deja.com Search -- News groups related to Albee.

Yahoo News Search -- Yahoo articles and news related to Albee.

Northern Light -- Northern Light online articles and sites about Albee and his work.

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