Edward Albee: A Playwright Staring at Our Comforting Illusions
EDWARD ALBEE, the playwright, was born in 1928, and raised in Westchester County, New York as Edward Franklin Albee III. He may be the greatest American playwright in the years after Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and before David Mamet and Sam Shepard.
Albee felt that art should be useful, and he admired craftsmen — artists making something of sturdy use to society. The masks and ornaments of African tribal art were needed for certain dances or religious ceremonies. There was room for the sculptor’s personal signature — but not too much. It was the RITUAL that was great, not the artist.
Albee also felt that one function of art is to expand the boundaries of the form within which it’s made. Even in old age, Albee was proud of experimenting with his writing, taking chances in his work. A striking tension in his plays is that they try to be useful while describing dysfunction, guilt and hatred.
Albee was given up by his birth mother and adopted by Reed Albee, a theater owner, and Frances Cotter Albee, a former buyer for the Jay Thorpe store on West 57th Street. Edward Albee’s paternal grandfather was a vaudeville impresario.
From the time he was 12, Edward Albee knew he was gay. He took this matter-of-factly, and even in the 1940’s, when most gay men stayed firmly in the closet, he saw no sense in hiding his attraction to men. “What could be worse,” he liked to say, “than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?”
If the gay man’s place in society was peripheral and difficult, so was the playwright’s. Albee would be a gifted outsider, tolerated rather than embraced, never fully understood. He made peace with that role.
As a boy, Edward Albee loved to draw and paint, loved music and poetry — and the theater. Because theater was in the Albee family, his parents often took him to plays. He loved seeing “Jumbo,” starring Doris Day, Jimmy Durante and an elephant.
Washed up matinee idols of past decades were frequent house guests at the Albee’s: men like Billy Gaxton, Victor Moore and Ed Wynn, men once rich and famous but now foundering in semi-respectable retirement. That was a useful lesson for young Edward about the fleeting nature of fame and money in the theater world.
But if the Albee family routinely exposed Edward to actors, the family — especially Edward’s mother, Frances — was fiercely protective of the family name, devoted to keeping up appearances and opposed to risk-taking of all kinds. Frances Albee did not live like an artist, nor think that any member of her family should do so.
One night, when he was a teenager, Edward found a volume of Turgenev in the family library. He took it down from the shelf and spent the evening with it, not fully grasping its meaning, but more and more excited by the words of this Russian master. In the morning, Edward noticed a certain chill at the breakfast table. When he asked what was wrong, his mother said: “There is a book missing from the shelf in the library.” She made clear it had left an ugly gap.
Edward wanted to say: ‘Yes, it’s a volume of Turgenev, I discovered it last night — and it’s marvelous!’ But he knew this excuse would not fly. His mother hadn’t read the book and didn’t care to. Books were not sustenance to her; they were decorative, but she would not tolerate having her bookshelf disturbed.
So having a conventional son who wrote respectable plays “for the theater” was something Mrs. Albee could respect. If asked, she might even offer some connections in the theater world. But having an openly gay son writing surrealistic, homoerotic Off Broadway plays was not at all what Frances Cotter Albee had in mind.
Over time, Edward concluded that his parents really hadn’t known how to be parents — and, to be fair, that he hadn’t known how to be a good son. He’d been preoccupied with plays and with the task of learning how to take care of himself. He hadn’t bothered to thank his parents for taking him in, and providing for his material needs.
At 19 years old, in 1948, without going to college, Edward Albee left Westchester County for Greenwich Village.
He delighted in the more bohemian parts of New York City. He appraised the worth of cities by whether or not a Samuel Beckett play could have a successful commercial run there. Since Beckett plays drew large audiences in New York, then New York was a worthy city.
Albee saw plays, read novels and plays, and supported himself with odd jobs. He was a record salesman, and a Western Union messenger. He liked the Western Union job, because if he said something even mildly clever as he delivered the message, he usually got a good tip.
All the time, he was soaking up influences. Samuel Beckett was one, and Eugene Ionesco another. These were playwrights who didn’t worry about being realistic. They wrote bold, absurd, experimental plays, and for Albee it was liberating. He soaked up all sorts of things in those years. He came to know slightly a literature professor, Willard Maas and his wife, Marie Mekevicius, who had a combative, volatile marriage.
In a bar one night, Albee was struck by a piece of graffiti scrawled there: “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
In 1959, over a three-week span, Edward Albee wrote “The Zoo Story” and realized that, for the first time, his language was not mimicking anyone else’s; it was his own. He’d finally put his influences aside and found his own voice. And when “The Zoo Story” was also a commercial success, Edward Albee’s life began to change.
“The Zoo Story” is a one-act play with two main characters: Peter, a stolid middle-class sort in the publishing business, with a wife and kids and cats and parakeets; and Jerry, an erratic, homeless man, unwilling to be controlled but eager, almost desperate for human connection. The conversation between the two of them becomes stranger and stranger, and ends in violence — a shock to audiences in 1959, conditioned as they were to think of conversation between people at the zoo as conventional and safe.
Then in 1962, Albee wrote a deeply ugly play — a portrait of a faculty couple who cruelly humiliate each other. Perhaps inspired by memories of Willard Maas and his wife, Albee wrote a play about George, a 56-year-old college professor in a New England town, and Martha, his alcoholic wife.
Confused by what is truth and what’s illusion, George and Martha like each other’s anger but can’t forgive their spouse for loving them. They invite into their home a young professor who has flummoxed George and Martha with his ambition. Both of them lumber and strain to wound the young professor, but only end up further wounding themselves.
Recalling that graffiti he’d seen scrawled in the bar a decade before, Edward Albee called this new play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” — Who’s afraid of living life without illusions to comfort us? The play also asks: Why are we so committed to the institution of marriage? And why are we so casual about the heavy consumption of alcohol?
It’s probably Albee’s best play, and has become an American classic. It was his first play that lasted longer than 55 minutes. In 1966 came a first-rate movie version, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Because of the ugliness in the play, many people asked Albee: “Why did you write that?” He’d reply ‘I’m not didactic; I don’t sit down, armed with reasons, to write about some social theme.’ Or he’d reply, “We all write because we don’t like what we see, and we want people to be better and different.”
Some took Albee to task for not having more sympathy for his characters. He found this critique childish. When people said his plays weren’t funny, he thought that was a better critique, and would say with a smile, “I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.”
Around 1966, to Albee’s amazement, the Broadway producer David Merrick hired him to try to save a struggling musical version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Apparently, Merrick had three weeks to fire the director, fire the stage director, decide which half of the cast to fire — and then install some new and much better songs. Since David Merrick was doing all that in three weeks, he had no time to rewrite the musical’s “book” to match the new songs. He asked Albee to handle that.
Albee took a crack at this and later commented: “They made a perfectly safe, middlebrow, mediocre, and I thought extremely boring musical that probably would have run a year on Broadway. I managed to turn it into a disaster that never opened on Broadway.”
Albee struggled from the late 1960’s to the mid-1990’s to write anything as powerfully original as “The Zoo Story” or “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He struggled and failed — or at least that was the mainstream view of his work.
Albee felt otherwise. Never lacking in confidence, he would say that the popular playwrights are lightweights who “reflect the public taste” when the point of art is to CREATE the public taste. Albee said universities and drama critics are alike; they “both have dull and half-dead faculties.” Being labeled by critics as a “gay writer” always annoyed Albee. He felt some of his best plays hadn’t been recognized yet, and seemed unconcerned: “They’ll figure it out eventually.”
And, if not, Albee was never crazy about 900-seat theaters anyway, theaters filled with wealthy, middle-aged middlebrows and casual theatergoers lured by a wish to see “the play that everyone’s talking about.” A 200-seat theater filled with a younger, smarter, more alert audience was just fine with Edward Albee.
Then in 1994 came a brilliant new Albee play, “Three Tall Women,” which seems to have been inspired by Frances Cotter Albee. It’s partly about a dying woman’s determined contempt for her gay son who left home at 18.
The three tall women are called A, B & C. A is a rich widow, sitting upright in a chair. B is her capable, younger caretaker. C is her lawyer, tending to her finances. By the end of the play, we realize that A,B& C, strikingly different as they seem, are the same woman in various stages of life. A boy turns up on stage, silent, watchful; it’s the only time in his career that Albee was conscious of putting himself on stage.
“Three Tall Women” won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Critics and journalists congratulated Albee on his “comeback,” but Albee wasn’t buying it. First of all, he felt he’d never been away. And second, he felt if failure is a problem for a playwright, so is success. Both are obstacles to be surmounted.
Edward Albee died in 2016. He was fairly tolerant of the headstrong quality of theater directors — he knew they had temperamental actors to handle. But it got his back up when directors tried to “interpret” his plays by changing them.
“I’ve got a kind of orneriness to me,” Albee would say. “This is the play I wrote, and this is damn well the play I want done.”