Happy Birthday - Edward Albee

Yesterday was Edward Albee's birthday.

(also my sister Barbara's, incidentally)

Has won three Pulitzer Prizes for drama.

Has won two Tony Awards as author of Best Play winners: in 1963 for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and in 2002 for "Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" He has also been Tony-nominated five other times: in 1964 as author of Best Play nominee "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe;" in 1965 as Best Author (Dramatic) and as author of Best Play nominee "Tiny Alice;" and, also as author of a Best Play nominee, in 1967 for "A Delicate Balance" and in 1975 for "Seascape."

Trivia, Jan. 92: He was arrested on a beach in Key Biscayne, FL, for indecent exposure. Charges were dropped when it was determined that he had removed his swimming trunks only to rinse out the sand that was in them, and had not done anything that could result in criminal charges.

As a drama student Mr. Albee was my favorite playwright. I started acting in High School. One of the first plays I was cast in, was Albee's 'The Sand Box'.

James Elmer in  'The Sand Box', with Joan Parker as Granny.

Dir. by William Higley at Weber High School - 1969

Albee's absurdest writing style inspired me when I was assigned to write a one act play for my High School drama class. I wrote 'Did You Know Ronny's Raising Rats In The Attic?', my brother wanted help with his assignment so I wrote another one for him, 'A Sidewalk In South Hampton'. My brother got an 'A' and I got a 'B' (My justice for cheating, eh?). 

The teacher, Mr. William Higley, wanted to use my brother's play for the State One-Act Play Competition, so I had to come clean and admit that I had written it. We did a little rewriting and I ended up directing and co-starring in the play. We won the regional competition and qualified for State. At State, the play received and honorable mention and I was awarded best supporting actor. In our critique, the judge that kept us from winning stated that she gave us a poor rating because the play was morbid, cruel and depressing. I retorted, "That was the exact intent, so I guess the play was a success. It is a morality tale of 'evil triumphing over good'. Good doesn't always prevail in life, too bad you didn't get it, even though you did actually get it." I was subsequently offered a Theater Arts scholarship by the host institution, Brigham Young University.

At the left, is Joan Parker and James Elmer beating to death their hapless, blind playmate, Cheryl Wayment,  shrouded in a dusty burlap potato sack. The play's characters included a doctor who gives the children prescription drugs, a streetwalker who suggests to the two children that the blind girl is different and not as worthy of life as the others, a bag lady who provides the burlap bag to hide the girl from society who starts off the attack on the little blind girl by repeatedly bumping into her with her shopping cart. She leaves the cart with the children and they escalate the attack. As they are pummeling her the boy says, "Let's dig her eyes out with our fingers." The girl replies, "Why, what good would that do? She's already blind." So instead they beat her to death with their toys. The boy and girl are called home for dinner. A policeman walking his beat discovers the sack stuffed with the body of the blind girl, but it's at the end of his shift and a report would keep him working late...so he checks to be certain she's dead and that no one has seen him and goes on his way. The narrator chimes in that, "On bright sunny days in South Hampton, like this one has been, our children play." as the curtain falls as a cheerful children's song plays out.

I guess the judge was right. It is morbid, cruel and depressing. Anyway back to Edward Albee, seen below being honored with three others at the New York Punlic Library.

Ashley Bryan, Nora Ephron, Edward Albee and Salman Rushdie (November 3, 2008)

Edward Albee: American playwright's goal is to stir humans to change Albee views drama as a catalyst and creates plays that hold up a mirror tohuman behavior and make people think.

In 30 plays over half a century, Edward Albee has outraged, engaged, entertained, and puzzled – some would say baffled – the public. The octogenarian playwright hopes he has also prodded his audience to think about issues that matter. The legendary actress Elizabeth Ashley, starring in Albee's latest play, "Me, Myself and I," (at Playwrights Horizons theater in New York City from Sept. 12 to Oct. 10), calls him "one of the great artist-warriors" and "a hero of humanity" who is "fighting for that which is most valuable in civilization."

Zachary Booth (l.) plays one of a pair of identical twins, both of whom are named Otto (the other is played by Preston Sadleir), in Edward Albee’s ‘Me, Myself, and I.’ 


Although lauded as the conscience of the American theater, Albee doesn't create hortatory, agitprop dramas as were popular during the Depression. Popularity has never been his problem; many plays have been deemed impenetrable, overly cerebral experiments. After his 1983 play "The Man with Three Arms" was roundly denounced (a Variety critic calling it "an intolerable audience ordeal"), no new, full-length plays by Albee appeared in New York for a decade.

During this partial eclipse, Albee kept speaking out for artistic freedom, teaching at the University of Houston, and writing plays, which were produced in regional theaters and Europe.

Not until 1993-94, when the Off-Broadway Signature Theater Company devoted its season to his work and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Three Tall Women" was performed in New York, was his reputation resuscitated. Now he's acclaimed as America's preeminent living playwright, a testament to perseverance and refusal to compromise one's vision. 

Rebirth in rebellion

Emily Mann, director of the new play and artistic director of Princeton's McCarter Theatre, calls Albee "one of the true greats" in the pantheon of dramatists, rating his work "at the very top" of world dramatic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The accolades are impressive: three Pulitzers (the others were for "A Delicate Balance" in 1967 and "Seascape" in 1975), three Tony Awards, and a 2005 Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.

 

(Right - Edward Albee debuts 'Me, Myself & I' at Playwrights Horizons… (Joan Marcus)

Ever since "Zoo Story" (1958) and his masterpiece "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962), Albee has been writing complex, complicated plays full of barbed dialogue. His works probe dysfunctional family dynamics and reveal moral and spiritual vacuity at the root of characters' complacency. He views drama as a catalyst for change, saying in a recent interview, "If a play is not socially useful, if it doesn't have content and make people think intelligently, it's a waste of time." He adds, "Plays hold a mirror up to us and show us how we're behaving and why we shouldn't [behave that way], and maybe we should learn how to behave better and more usefully." - By Carol Strickland, Contributor / September 22, 2010

Edward Albee, c. 1961

Albee, Edward [Franklin, III] (b. March 12, 1928), playwright. 

The adopted grandson of the vaudeville magnate E. F. Albee, he was born in Washington, D. C., and suffered an unhappy youth, which included being enrolled and removed from a number of schools, briefly attending Trinity College, and assuming a series of odd jobs that ranged from Western Union delivery boy to salesclerk. When early attempts at writing poetry were unrewarding, he turned to playwriting at the suggestion of Thornton Wilder. His first play, The Zoo Story, was initially produced in Germany in 1959, then in America a year later. In The Sandbox (1960), he tells how an exasperated Mommy and Daddy leave Grandma on a beach to await the coming of Death in the guise of a young boy. The American Dream (1961), in which parents kill their disappointing child, and The Death of Bessie Smith (1961), a dramatization of the singer's last hours, were well received. His study of a troubled marriage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), was roundly praised and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the next year saw his adaptation of Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café reach Broadway. Critics and audiences alike were baffled by Tiny Alice (1964), in which the richest woman in the world seduces and destroys a Catholic lay brother. In 1966 his dramatization of a novel, Malcolm, and his libretto for Breakfast at Tiffany's were unfavorably received, but A Delicate Balance had a modest run. A series of interesting failures followed: Everything in the Garden (1967), All Over (1971), Seascape (1975), The Lady from Dubuque (1980), and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983). Albee's career took a positive turn with the award‐winning Three Tall Women (1994), followed by the well‐received The Play About the Baby (2001) and The Goat (2002). Albee's plays have dealt with his unique miasma of fantasy and reality, and his figures' inability to come to terms with this sometimes frightening combination. His bent has been largely confrontational and philosophic, but beneath his work lies a disturbed sexuality. Biography: Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, Mel Gussow, 2000.

Works by Edward Albee

1959  The Zoo Story. This short one-act drama, Albee's debut, is first performed in Berlin and would appear in New York in 1960. It focuses on an encounter between a complacent middle-class man, sitting on a bench in New York City's Central Park, and an alienated young man who goads him into violence. Like much of Albee's early work, it challenges confidence in conventional American values. Albee was born in Virginia and grew up in a wealthy household in Larchmont, New York. He wrote his first play while working as an office boy, record salesman, and Western Union delivery boy.

1959  The Death of Bessie Smith

1959  Fam and Yam
 

1960  The Sandbox. The play is an excoriating attack on the contemporary American family, represented by cartoonlike characters (Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma). Grandma is relegated to a sandbox, infantilized by her family, but still protesting her fate in remarkably graphic language.
 

1961  An American Dream. Albee's surrealistic one-act play brings back the characters from The Sandbox--the dominating Mommy and hen-pecked Daddy--to present a grotesque version of the American family. The parents kill their son when he fails to meet their expectations. It is presented with the playwright's The Death of Bessie Smith, winner of the Berlin Festival Award and chosen as best play of the 1960-1961 season by the Foreign Press Association. It is a dramatization of the singer's end when she is refused treatment at a whites-only hospital.
 

1962  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Generally regarded as Albee's most thoroughly realized play, the realistic and allegorical drama concerns a middle-aged married couple, George and Martha, who in the course of one drunken evening engage in a sadistic catfight before an unwilling younger couple obliged by social niceties to stay and watch. The struggle ends only when George symbolically murders his and Martha's nonexistent son and the couple, in Albee's words, fulfill the need to "try to claw [their] way into compassion."
 

1963  The Ballad of the Sad Café. Critics commend Albee's adaptation of Carson McCullers's story, but it manages only a fifteen-week engagement.
 

1964  Tiny Alice. Albee's play concerns the world's richest woman, whose $2 billion donation to the Catholic Church involves seducing and murdering the lay brother whom she invites to pick up the money. Audiences find the play baffling, and critics are divided concerning its merits.
 

1965  Malcolm (adapted from the novel by James Purdy)
 

1966  A Delicate Balance. Despite generally negative reviews and a modest run of only 132 performances, Albee's metaphysical drawing-room drama exploring the connection between sanity and madness is awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
 

1966  Breakfast at Tiffany's
 

1967  Everything in the Garden
 

1968  Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Albee's interrelated one-act plays show his intention to apply "musical form to dramatic structure." In the first play, an offstage voice comments on the decline of Western civilization while a large cube is illuminated on stage. In the second, the cube becomes the deck of a cruise ship where Mao recites from his "Little Red Book," an elderly woman recites doggerel, and another woman offers a personal anecdote.
 

1971  All Over. Albee's drama treats the deathbed wrangling of friends and relatives while awaiting a man's passing. The playwright's most extensive examination of death and dying, it fails with both critics and audiences.
 

1975  Seascape. The playwright wins his second Pulitzer Prize for this expressionistic fantasy play depicting the confrontation on a beach between a couple and two humanoid figures.
 

1975  Listening   

1977  Counting the Ways. Albee's one-act play, subtitled "A Vaudeville," explores various responses to love. It is performed with Listening, an expressionistic drama dealing with mental illness.
 

1977-1979  The Lady From Dubuque
 

1981  Lolita (adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
 

1981  The Man Who Had Three Arms
 

1983  Finding the Sun
 

1986-1987  Marriage Play
 

1994  Three Tall Women. A powerful woman dominates this play, first as a young adult, then in middle age, and finally as an aging matriarch. Albee has confessed that the character is based on his rather difficult adoptive mother, a figure--like the character in the play--prone to great hatreds and paranoia. At the same time, though, she is impressive for her extraordinary self-confidence and stamina. The play also contains Albee's trademark absurdist humor. Critics consider it his finest work in thirty years.
 

1992  The Lorca Play
 

1993  Fragments
 

1996  The Play About the Baby
 

2001  Occupant
 

2002  The Goat or Who is Sylvia?
 

2003  Knock! Knock! Who's There!?
 

2004  Peter & Jerry retitled in 2009 as At Home at the Zoo (Act One: Homelife. Act Two: The Zoo Story) (2004)
 

2007  Me, Myself and I
 

2009  At Home At The Zoo