MARTIN ANDRUCKI · BATES COLLEGE ·
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Edward Albee.

Edward Albee, born in 1928, is the adopted son of Reed and Frances Albee.  The playwright's adoptive father was part-owner of the Keith-Albee Theater Circuit, a chain of theaters that operated throughout a large portion of the United States, bringing the Albee family considerable wealth.  Reed Albee, who retired in the year of his son's birth, has been described as a "quiet and deferent man."  Frances, on the other hand, was much younger, physically larger, and far more assertive than her husband.  About his relations with his adoptive mother, Albee has written that, "We had managed to make each other very unhappy over the years. . . .  I harbor no ill-will toward her; it is true I could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self."  Together with these ambivalent feelings about his adoptive parents, Albee has expressed "a deep-seated resentment against my natural parents for abandoning me."
 
Albee grew up in Larchmont, a rich suburb of New York City, enjoying the luxuries of wealth: domestic servants, horses, chauffeurs, winter excursions to warm climates, and expensive private schools.  Among these were Valley Forge Military Academy (which he called a "concentration camp"), and Choate.  He did poorly at both, though he found happiness at Choate in the form of teachers who were sympathetic to his literary ambitions.  After Choate, Albee attended Trinity College for a year and a half and, briefly--following a stint in the Army--Columbia University.
 
Formal education, obviously, was not Albee's goal.  Instead, he wanted to be a poet, an ambition he pursued--with the aid of a trust fund supplied by his beloved grandmother--until his late twenties.  Because this fund supplied a somewhat limited income, Albee had to find supplementary work to support his poetic career.  Among his many jobs were radio writer, office boy, record salesman, book salesman, hotel counterman, and Western Union messenger: "any job so long as it had no future" was how Albee described the employment history of his twenties.
 
Thanks to his father's business connections, Albee was able to meet many important figures in the worlds of theater and literature, including the English expatriate poet, W.H. Auden, and the American dramatist, Thornton Wilder.  Both expressed little enthusiasm for his poetry, the latter advising Albee to try writing plays instead.  On his thirtieth birthday in 1958 Albee finally took Wilder's advice.  He quit his job with Western Union and began writing “The Zoo Story,” his first important work for the theater.  Completed in three weeks, this one-act play initially met with rejection by a number of New York producers, and was first staged outside the United States at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in Berlin in September, 1959.  It was eventually produced in New York in January of 1960 at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village as one half of a double bill with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
 
This pairing with Beckett, together with “The Zoo Story's” themes of alienation and random violence, initially positioned Albee as a member of the rising generation of "absurdist" dramatists, authors who emphasized the despair of human beings facing a meaningless universe.  Albee's next successful works, “The Sandbox” (1960) and “The American Dream” (1961)--scathingly surreal portraits of family life whose characters speak almost entirely in banalities and cliches--strengthened this identification.
 
Then came Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Albee's most famous work to date, and the play that brought him international fame and financial independence.  Squarely in the realist tradition, with its domestic interior, its rivers of tongue-loosening booze, and its married couples whose wounds are probed and secrets unearthed, it nevertheless preserves elements of the earlier, "absurdist" Albee, most notably in the figure of the imaginary son, lovingly nurtured and then ruthlessly destroyed by his parents.
 
It also deals with themes from the playwright's own family past.  In the brassy, domineering character of Martha we can discern the outlines of Albee's outsize adoptive mother, while his "deferent" adoptive father appears in the quiet, cuckolded, professor/husband, George.  Likewise we can read back from the campus setting of Who's Afraid . . . to Albee's preppy background at schools like Choate and Trinity.  And the imaginary son surely reflects Albee's own sense of his ambivalent place in his adoptive family.
 
This admixture of realism, "absurdist" (or surreal) fantasy, and autobiographical allusion contains the ingredients from which Albee would concoct his most successful plays for the rest of his career.  We can see these elements in varying combinations in Tiny Alice (1964), A Delicate Balance (1966; Pulitzer Prize, 1967), The Lady from Dubuque (1980), The Man Who Had Three Arms (1982), and his most recent success, Three Tall Women (1994).
 
The vein of surreal fantasy, and the echoes of the master absurdist, Beckett, are especially strong in Seascape (1975), for which Albee was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize.
  • Home
    • About me
    • Resources
  • The Public Theater
    • Titles A thru G >
      • A >
        • All in the Timing
        • Almost Maine
        • Animals Out of Paper
        • Around the World in 80 Days
        • Art
      • B >
        • Betrayal
        • Biloxi Blues
        • Blithe Spirit
        • The Book Club Play
        • Broadway Bound
        • To Build a Fire
        • The Business of Murder
      • C >
        • A Christmas Carol
        • The Cocktail Hour
        • Collected Stories
        • Communicating Doors
        • The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged
        • Crossing Delancey
      • D >
        • Dancing at Lughnasa
        • Deathtrap
        • Doubt
        • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
        • Dracula
        • Driving Miss Daisy
      • E >
        • Educating Rita
      • F >
        • Fallen Angels
        • Fiction
        • The Foreigner
        • Fuddy Meers
      • G >
        • The Glass Menagerie
        • Good People
        • Gun Shy
    • Titles H thru O >
      • H >
        • Hedda Gabler
        • Holiday Memories
        • The Hound of the Baskervilles
        • Humble Boy
      • I >
        • Indoor/Outdoor
        • An Infinite Ache
        • Italian American Reconciliation
      • L >
        • The Language Archive
        • Last Gas
        • The Last Mass
        • The Last Romance
        • Lend me a Tenor
        • Lips Together
        • Lost in Yonkers
        • Love/Sick
      • M >
        • Manny's War
        • Marjorie Prime
        • Marvin's Room
        • Miss Witherspoon
        • A Month of Sundays
        • Moonlight and Magnolias
        • Moonshine
      • N >
        • The Nerd
      • O >
        • The Old Settler
        • On Golden Pond
        • Orphans
        • Outside Mullingar
        • Over the River
    • Titles P thru W >
      • P >
        • Pavillion
        • Prelude to a Kiss
        • Private Lives
        • Proof
        • Psychopathia Sexualis
      • R >
        • Red
        • Red Herring
        • The Revolutionists
        • Rough Crossing
        • Rumors
      • S >
        • Seascape
        • Shirley Valentine
        • Side Man
        • Skylight
        • Sleuth
        • Southern Comforts
        • Steel Magnolias
      • T >
        • Terra Nova
        • 13th of Paris
        • Three Days of Rain
        • Tigers Be Still
        • Time Stands Still
      • U >
        • Under the Skin
      • V >
        • Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike
        • Visiting Mr. Green
      • W >
        • Wait Until Dark
        • What Rhymes with America
        • The Wind in the Willows
        • The Woman in Black
        • Wrong for Each Other
  • Portland Theater
    • Season 93 94 I
    • Season 93 94 II
    • Season 94 95 I
    • Season 94 95 II
    • Season 95 96
    • Season 96 97
    • Fool for Love
    • Ghosts
  • Playwrights
    • Albee to Coward >
      • Edward Albee
      • David Auburn
      • Alan Ayckbourne
      • Truman Capote
      • John Cariani
      • Noel Coward
    • Dickens to Harris >
      • Charles Dickens
      • Joe DiPietro
      • Arthur Conan Doyle
      • Tom Dudzick
      • Christopher Durang
      • Brian Friel
      • A.R. Gurney
      • Richard Harris
    • Ibsen to Nolan >
      • Henrik Ibsen
      • David Ives
      • Rajiv Joseph
      • Ira Levin
      • David Lindsay-Abaire
      • Jack London
      • Ken Ludwig
      • Donald Margulies
      • James Nolan
    • Pinter to Shue >
      • Harold Pinter
      • Yasmina Reza
      • Willy Russell
      • Susan Sandler
      • Robert W. Service
      • John Patrick Shanley
      • Larry Shue
    • Simon to Zacarias >
      • Neil Simon
      • Mat Smart
      • Craig White
      • Tennessee Williams
      • Karen Zacarias