Edward Albee, 88, playwright of modern masterpieces . By Nelson
Pressley WASHINGTON POST . WASHINGTON - Edward Albee, one of the most
innovative playwrights of his generation, whose raw, unnerving dramas -
and even the few comedies - scraped at the veneer of American success
and happiness, died Friday at his home in Montauk, N.Y.. He was 88.
Jakob Holder, executive director of the Edward F. Albee Foundation,
confirmed the death but did not provide a cause. Mr. Albee had no
immediate survivors. The length of his career and the force of his best
works earned Mr. Albee a place in the first rank of 20th-century
American playwrights, alongside Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and
Tennessee Williams. Only O'Neill won more Pulitzer Prizes - four to Mr.
Albee's three, for the plays "A Delicate Balance," "Seascape," and
"Three Tall Women. His most enduring, produced, and analyzed work was
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It is now widely regarded as a
masterpiece of 20th-century American theater. The play was an effort,
he once said, to dig "so deep under the skin that it becomes
practically intolerable. Indeed, it showed marriage as a blood sport. A
drama interspersed with corrosive comedy, "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? charts a single blistering night with a history professor named
George and his boozy wife, Martha, and the young couple they ensnare in
their destructive, often vulgar role-playing. Drunkenness, profanity as
brickbats, ferreting out secrets and using them to wound - all were
part of what in the play were called "fun and games. The play, Mr.
Albee once said, was about "the ways we get through life" and spoke to
"living life without illusions. The verbal attacks among the two main
characters were spectacular and venomous, stirring outrage among more
conservative critics and theatergoers but winning plaudits from many
powerful reviewers for the work's discomforting, even shocking
vitality. The critic Stanley Kauffmann called it "the best American
play of the last decade and a violently candid one. The initial
Broadway run, starring Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen, ran from 1962 to 1964
and won the Tony Award for best play. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
established Mr. Albee, then 34, as an astringent heir to O'Neill.
"Albee's importance can't be overstated," said Matthew C. Roudane,
professor of English at Georgia State University and an expert on
playwrights. Albee's "powerful, angry satiric voice" reinvigorated a
Broadway that had been defined by the dramatic works of O'Neill,
Miller, and Williams, Roudane said. Mr. Albee was wary of labels. They
"can be facile and can lead to non-think on the part of the public," he
wrote in a 1962 New York Times essay. Yet his influences included Anton
Chekhov and Williams for their nuanced characters and baseline
melancholy, and he generally accepted being associated with the
absurdist theater. "The avant-garde theatre is fun; it is
free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic and often wildly, wildly funny," he
wrote in the Times essay, championing experiment. Mr. Albee was
featured in Martin Esslin's seminal 1961 study, "The Theatre of the
Absurd," and when Eugène Ionesco died in 1994, Mr. Albee penned an
appreciation, identifying the author of "The Bald Soprano" and
"Rhinoceros" as an obvious influence on his own early plays and
writing, "What a hard act to follow! "He was always an experimental
writer, always out there on the edge," Roudane said, noting that Mr.
Albee once called the Broadway audience "such placid cows. "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was denied the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, when
the 14-member advisory board split over the play (some were shocked by
the frank, abusive language) and ignored the Pulitzer jury's
enthusiastic recommendation. No award was given, and the two jurors -
respected drama critics and theater historians - resigned in protest.
In 1967, Mr. Albee won the Pulitzer for "A Delicate Balance," prompting
director Mike Nichols to cable him: "Well, you can't lose them all.
Meanwhile, "Who's Afraid" endured a run of censorship battles,
including in Boston. The 1966 film version, directed by Nichols and
starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, was initially denied an
official seal of approval by movie censors. The film was later credited
with helping usher in the new G-to-X rating system. Mr. Albee, who once
declared "I despise restful art," practically went out of his way not
to try to top the commercial success of "Who's Afraid. He pursued
experimental styles and wildly imaginative premises that included
talking lizards, a man with three arms, and a man romancing a goat; for
many years, his avant-garde approach made him persona non grata on
Broadway. "Most people want tidy, frivolous stuff," Albee told the Los
Angeles Times in 2002, "so they can go home and not worry about what
they've seen. He was rehabilitated, commercially speaking, with the
popular success of "Three Tall Women," his most autobiographical play.
It also won a Pulitzer in 1994. That drama, his 25th, dealt with Mr.
Albee's mother, a stern, disapproving figure who could not bear to
discuss her son's homosexuality. After Mr. Albee left home in anger in
1949, he and his mother did not speak to each other again until 1965.
She died in 1989. "The play is a kind of exorcism," Mr. Albee said of
"Three Tall Women. The technically daring, emotionally draining play
put his mother on stage in triplicate: The woman is simultaneously seen
as young, middle-aged, and elderly, and is played by three separate
actresses. Mr. Albee was born in Washington, to a single woman named
Louise Harvey. He was placed in an adoption nursery in New York, where
he soon was adopted by a childless couple, Reed Albee and the former
Frances Loring Cotter. He was named Edward Franklin Albee III. His
namesake - his new paternal grandfather - ran the Keith-Albee chain of
vaudeville theaters, off of which the Albees lived a comfortable life
in Larchmont, N.Y., during the Great Depression. Cooks and servants
attended to the family needs, and the pampered young Edward began
wearing a smoking jacket at age 7. Although he never wanted for
material comfort, the Albee family was described by the future
playwright as wantonly cruel at best. His new father was a womanizing
cipher of a man, he recalled. The bulk of Mr. Albee's filial ire was
aimed at his mother, who was not above taunting her son for being
adopted. In return, Mr. Albee often made bitter comments about being
"bought"; babies and their neglect would be a recurring theme in many
of his works. He rebelled early and often, putting so little effort
into his studies that he was thrown out of a series of private schools
in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Even so, his potential was apparent,
at least to some of his school supervisors. One headmaster recommended
Mr. Albee to another school despite the student's failures, noting the
particularly bad match between mother and son. Mr. Albee wrote poems
and stories from an early age, and he was taken to the theater because
of the family business. He wouldn't see the works that influenced him
most deeply until his Greenwich Village years in the 1950s, when he
fell in with a circle of avant-garde artists, musicians and
intellectuals. His own path was indistinct for years; in his 20s, Mr.
Albee's longest, happiest job was delivering messages for Western
Union, which he liked for the exercise and flexibility. It also fleshed
out the small income he drew from a trust fund from his maternal
grandmother that paid him $25 a week beginning in 1949. Mr. Albee's
career did not really begin until 1958, when he dashed off "The Zoo
Story" over three weeks "as a 30th birthday present to myself. The
one-act play was a single uninterrupted scene at a bench in New York's
Central Park, in which a random encounter between a nervous, edgy
character named Jerry and a middle-class publishing executive named
Peter ends in violence. The drama seemed to capture a jitteriness and
alienation that would become increasingly characteristic in the more
cynical 1960s, but that registered as brash and fresh at its debut. In
1961 Mr. Albee attacked racism in "The Death of Bessie Smith," based on
the refusal of a white-run Southern hospital to treat the critically
injured blues singer. The same year, Mr. Albee wrote a vicious satire
called "The American Dream," caricaturing a family headed by Mommy and
Daddy and featuring their little adopted "bumble of joy," a son they
destroy - a strong hint of what was to come in "Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? For much of the 1960s, Mr. Albee abandoned the
emotional clarity and explosiveness of "Virginia Woolf" for more
abstract premises. John Gielgud and Irene Worth signed on to star in
"Tiny Alice" (1964), but Gielgud was not alone in his confusion over
the meaning of the complicated religion-sex-metaphysics drama. With "A
Delicate Balance," Albee resoundingly made good on his "Virginia Woolf"
promise. The brilliantly original "Balance," which featured Hume Cronyn
and Jessica Tandy in the Broadway cast, studied a long-married couple
whose neighbors - suddenly terrified of something they can't name -
arrive at the door and ask to move in. For the next two decades,
however, Mr. Albee produced more prickly puzzles. The twin bill "Box"
and "Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" (1968) reinforced his
enchantment with abstraction. "Seascape" (1975) won a Pulitzer, but
baffled some audiences with its plot about a couple on the beach
encountering two sea lizards. It ran for 65 performances. "The Man Who
Had Three Arms" (1983), which ran on Broadway for 16 performances, was
seen as criticizing critics. That play, like most of Mr. Albee's output
through the 1970s and 1980s, drew hostile reviews. The same period saw
a worsening of a decades-long drinking problem that began in the 1950s,
sometimes leading to public tirades and blackouts. Mr. Albee quit
drinking after "The Man Who Had Three Arms" was pronounced his third
straight Broadway flop. The motivation was pride. According to Jonathan
Thomas, Mr. Albee's partner from 1971 until Thomas's death in 2005, "He
just didn't want to present himself as a drunk. The subject of
homosexuality was unmistakable in "Three Tall Women. In the second act,
the woman's grown son, who is gay, sits by her bed and listens, but
never speaks. "Three Tall Women," which ran 582 performances
off-Broadway, was a triumph that overnight transformed Mr. Albee's
reputation from Broadway has-been to a dean of American playwrights. In
2002, "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? ," an uproariously funny yet
eventually tragic drama about a successful Manhattan architect's
marital infidelity with a goat, marked the first Albee play on Broadway
in nearly two decades. "The Goat" brought Mr. Albee another Tony and,
three years later, he was awarded a special Tony for lifetime
achievement. (He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1996.)
