EDWARD ALBEE
Edward Albee (1928-2016) was perhaps the most prolific American playwright writing in the second half of the 20th century, into the 21st. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and is perhaps best known for his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Edward Albee (1928-2016) was born in Washington, D.C. and adopted at 2 weeks old. He was named after his adoptive grandfather, who was in the theater himself, owning a series of successful vaudeville theaters. Albee had ups and downs in his childhood, being dismissed from 3 different schools before finally graduating from Choate and commencing at Trinity College, where he was also dismissed. He grew up wealthy and spend a significant amount of time post-Trinity living in New York on his grandmother’s trust fund. He travelled some, had odd jobs, and didn’t get up to much of note before the premiere of his first play, The Zoo Story.
He began writing as a child, his first play being Aliqueen, a farce he wrote at the age of 12. Once The Zoo Story premiere, he never really stopped writing plays for the rest of his life. He is one of the most prolific American playwrights of all time, and although his plays had varied levels of success, he is hard to match in terms of his impact on American theater.
He had several unique ventures that show what was most important to him. He visited four Iron Curtain countries as part of a US Department of State exchange program in the 1960s. He also ran an off-Broadway theater call Playwrights Unit, where nothing was paid, in an attempt to, in his own words, give playwrights the chance to “see their work before audiences without the commercial pressure of having a heavily financed production, or having those curious types, the critics, in to see what they are doing” (Albee and Kolin 81). You can read more about his opinions about critics and playwrights in the “Attributes” section.
Albee was a gay man, which created some tension at home. He was thrown out of his home at the age of 18. He lived with his lifetime partner Jonathan Thomas from 1971-2005, until Thomas’ death. Throughout his life, Albee was also a drinker, although he quit in the 80s and was sober for the remainder of his life. He died at the age of 88 in his home.
ATTRIBUTES
Albee was a relatively private man. He believed that a writer’s work and their process are private, and didn’t like to discuss how he wrote, meaning he granted few interviews (Albee and Kolin vii). There are three beliefs he held as a playwright that he really stuck to, and really come through in anything written about him. First, He believed in the sanctity of the script, and primacy of the playwright. He thought that any version of a play that was produced could never be as pure and true as the script itself. Second, he wanted his work to have an effect on people. He said “you with affect people of you leave them indifferent. And I would loathe to leave an audience indifferent”(Albee and Kolin 22). More than having an effect, he believed the theater “must be educating and upsetting as well as just plain entertaining” (Albee and Kolin 41). Third, he hated critics and the hold they had on public opinion. He had major problems with the ways the public interacted with critics, how they didn’t let people think for themselves.
Albee was not forthcoming about his influences in the theater. In interviews, he sounds relatively uninspired by theatermaking at the time. He cites some people he admires at different points in his life, people like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams, but in general, he was not excited about American playwrights. In 1962, he called himself “dissatisfied with the state of the American theater” (Albee and Kolin 11). He didn’t like to talk about his writing process, but has described it as getting an idea, sitting on it for weeks to months, and then beginning to write constantly until it is finished (Albee and Kolin 41). Albee was also deeply influenced by music, and the form that music takes. This has been noted and analyzed for many of his plays. He spoke frequently about the impact music had on his writing.
In addition to these attributes of Albee as a playwright, he was quite the man. He had a controversial mustache for some time, but general consensus was that he was a handsome man. There is some debate over whether he is the “angry young man” who is at the center of many of his plays. He was certainly rigid in his opinions about the theater, but I’m not sure if anger comes through in his interviews. In addition to playwriting, he was an art collector, a professor and lecturer, a traveller, and an animal lover (Albee and Kolin ix).
SOCIETY AT THE TIME
Albee was writing during the latter half of the 20th century, which was marked by a number of movements and ideological shifts. He started his career in post WWII society, wrote through the establishment of the United Nations, the civil rights movement, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, and many more. Albee’s place in theater can most easily be defined as a reaction to the 1950s, specifically, however. As Roundané writes, “the young Albee took measure of, and became disenchanted with, the rapidly shifting industrial, social, and political climate of the United States” (17). The disenchantment happened during the 1950s, and decade where people were doing everything they could to move past the Great Depression and WWII. This was a period marked by the “homogenization of America,” by consumerism and suburbia (Roudané 18). Most of Albee’s plays are about marriages and family, but his plays are dark and show the problems in those structures.
THEATER OF THE TIME
Edward Albee came onto the scene during a relatively low point in American theater history. He came after the period of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and American theater needed a boost. His time of writing was marked by the age of Broadway and Hollywood, where commercial success was key and experimentation was not always rewarded (Amacher 13). Major theater was not especially political, as it had been in the 1930s, and experimental theater was happening Off-Broadway. Albee cited one of the issues as being cowardly playwrights, people being scared to push the envelope for fear of not finding commercial success (Albee and Kolin 11). Albee premiered many plays in the US, but also abroad. He was a breath of fresh air in American theater, and was very influential in defining American theater in the second half of the 20th century.
ALBEE'S PLAYS
Edward Albee was an extremely prolific writer, having even been called “America’s Shakespeare” (Albee and Kolin viii). He won 3 Pulitzer Prizes and many other awards, and it probably best known for Who’s Afraif of Virginia Woolf?, which did not win a Pulitzer because of controversy over its content. Albee’s plays are not all of one genre. He has written in many different styles, from Expressionist to Surrealist to Realist.
His first play was The Zoo Story, a play featuring only two actors, who meet on a bench in Central Park. The play is simple, just a conversation between these two men, but ends with a violent act. His next play, The Sandbox, is much less realist. At only 14 minutes long, this pay is about “Mommy” and “Daddy” who are trying to bury “Grandma” in a sandbox so she will die. This is a much different play, with many more surrealist elements. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Is a play about the games people play in marriages. It focuses on a couple, George and Martha, who spend the evening with another couple, tormenting them and each other with word games and otherwise. The famous ending is that George and Martha have invented a son to cope with their infertility, and have been playing make-believe for the last 21 years. A Delicate Balance is a very realist play. It is almost a well-made play, with all the action taking place in one room in a house over a period of several days. A couple must deal with several guests entering their home and the tensions that arise. Even just through these short descriptions of four of Albee’s plays, we can see how many different styles and types of plays Albee wrote.
Albee also adapted several works into plays, such as The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm. These were less successful, although to be fair, Albee had varying success throughout his career. Although he was prolific and has gone down in history, many of Albee’s plays were flops and came nowhere near the success of Who’s Afraid?.
Although Albee wrote many different types of plays, there are commonalities between them. Baxandall notes that “the heart of his technique is an archetypal family unit, in which the hopes, dilemmas, and the values of our society are tangibly compressed” (19). Although he wrote during many political eras in American history, his stories are focused on the family and marriage. This was his entry point into societal critique, not hot-button issues. Notably, he did not write about play about the AIDS crisis, like many of his gay playwright contemporaries in the 1980s. He wrote “on death and dying, on wasted opportunities, on loss, and on the individual dwelling in an absurdist universe” (Roudané 8).
WORKS CITED
Works:
Albee, Edward, and Philip C. Kolin. Conversations with Edward Albee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Print.
Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. , 1982. Print.
Baxandall, Lee. “The Theatre of Edward Albee.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 9, no. 4, 1965, pp. 19–40. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1125030.
Roudané, Matthew C. Edward Albee: A Critical Introduction. , 2017. Print.
Photos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee#/media/File:EdwardAlbee.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee#/media/File:WIKI_-_Edward_Albee_1994.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee#/media/File:Edward_Albee.jpg
http://www.understandingrace.org/history/society/post_war_economic_boom.html
http://flavorwire.com/581348/relevant-or-relic-whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf-turns-50