Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
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Edward Franklin Albee
(born March 12, 1928, Washington, D.C., U.S.) U.S. playwright. He was the adopted grandson and namesake of a well-known vaudeville theatre manager. Among his early one-act plays, The Zoo Story (1959), The Sandbox (1959), and The American Dream (1961) established him as an astute critic of American values. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962; film, 1966), his first full-length play, was widely acclaimed. Albee won Pulitzer Prizes for A Delicate Balance (1966), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). He also adapted other writers' works for the stage, including Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1981).
For more information on Edward Franklin Albee, visit Britannica.com.
Edward Albee
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Oxford Companion to American Theatre:
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Albee, Edward [Franklin, III]
Albee, Edward [Franklin, III] (b. 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.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Albee, Edward [Franklin, III]
Albee, Edward (ăl'bē), 1928-, American playwright, one of the leading dramatists of his generation, b. Washington, D.C., as Edward Harvey. Much of his most characteristic work constitutes an absurdist commentary on American life. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962, film 1966), a Tony Award-winner that is generally regarded as his finest play, presents an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-aged professor and his wife verbally lacerate each other in brilliant colloquial language. His major early plays include The Zoo Story (1959), The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), The Sandbox (1960), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963, adapted from the novel by Carson McCullers), and Tiny Alice (1965). Albee won the Pulitzer Prize for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). Other later plays include The Lady from Dubuque (1980), Marriage Play (1987), The Play about the Baby (1998), the Tony Award-winning family tragicomedy The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), Occupant, a portrait of the artist Louise Nevelson (2002), and the semiautobiographical Me, Myself & I (2008).
Bibliography
See P. C. Kolin, Conversations with Edward Albee (1987); biography by M. Gussow (1999); studies by A. Paolucci (1972), R. E. Amacher (1982), and R. H. Solomon (2010).
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, Edward Franklin Born 1928.American playwright. Best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for A Delicate Balance, in 1975 for Seascape, and in 1994 for Three Tall Women.
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by Edward Albee
(b. 1928)
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Fine Arts:
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Albee, Edward
A twentieth-century American playwright whose early plays reflected the influence of the theater of the absurd. His psychological dramas include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tiny Alice, and A Delicate Balance.
Quotes By:
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Edward Albee
Quotes:
"I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor."
"What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy."
"The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it."
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Edward Albee
| Edward Albee | |
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 Edward Albee, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1961. |
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| Born | 12 March 1928 Virginia |
| Occupation | Dramatist |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1958 – present |
| Notable work(s) | Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Zoo Story The American Dream The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? |
| Notable award(s) | Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1967 1975 1994) Tony Award (1963 2002) National Medal of Arts (1996) Special Tony Award (2005) |
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Influenced
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Edward Franklin Albee III (
/ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in new works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
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Biography
According to Magill's Survey of American Literature (2007), Edward Albee was born somewhere in Virginia (the popular belief is that he was born in Washington, D.C.). He was adopted two weeks later and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
Albee attended the Clinton High School, then the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, from which he was expelled. He then was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he was dismissed in less than a year. He enrolled at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, graduating in 1946. His formal education continued at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was expelled in 1947 for skipping classes and refusing to attend compulsory chapel. In response to his expulsion, Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is believed to be based on his experiences at Trinity College.[citation needed]
Albee left home for good when he was in his late teens. In a later interview, he said: "I never felt comfortable with the adoptive parents. I don't think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn't know how to be a son, either."[1] More recently, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that he was "thrown out" because his parents wanted him to become a "corporate thug" and didn't approve of his aspirations to become a writer.[2]
Albee moved into New York's Greenwich Village, where he supported himself with odd jobs while learning to write plays. His first play, The Zoo Story, was first staged in Berlin. The less than diligent student later dedicated much of his time to promoting American university theatre. He currently is a distinguished professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches an exclusive playwriting course. His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service[3] and Samuel French, Inc..
Albee is openly gay and states that he first knew he was gay at age 12 and a half.[4] He has insisted, however, that he does not want to be known as a "gay writer," stating in his acceptance speech for the 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement: "A writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend self. I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay."[5]
Albee's longtime partner, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died on May 2, 2005, from bladder cancer.
Honors
A member of the Dramatists Guild Council, Albee has received three Pulitzer Prizes for drama — for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). His play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize by the award's drama jury, but was overruled by the advisory committee, which elected not to give a drama award at all. Albee was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972.[6] He received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996). In 2009 Albee received honorary degree a.k.a. "Doctor Honoris Causa" by the Bulgarian National Academy of Theater and Film Arts (NATFA) - a member of the Global Alliance of Theater Schools.
Albee is the President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., which maintains the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, a writers and artists colony in Montauk, New York.
In 2008, in celebration of Albee's eightieth birthday, a number of his plays were mounted in distinguished Off Broadway venues, including the historic Cherry Lane Theatre. The playwright directed two of his one-acts, The American Dream and The Sandbox there. These were first produced at the theater in 1961 and 1962, respectively.
Plays
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Essays
- Stretching My Mind: Essays 1960–2005 (Avalon Publishing, 2005)
Quotes
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This section is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process. |
- "What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?"
- "A usefully lived life is probably going to be, ultimately, more satisfying."[7]
- "Writing should be useful. If it can't instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness there's no point in doing it."
- "If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly."
- "That's what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan."
- "Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely."[8]
- "Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly."
- "All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time."
Discography
- Mark Richman & William Daniels in The Zoo Story by Edward Albee - Directed by Arthur Luce Klein (LP, Spoken Arts SA 808)
Awards and nominations
- Awards
- 1960 Drama Desk Award Vernon Rice Award - The Zoo Story
- 1963 Tony Award for Best Play - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - A Delicate Balance
- 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - Seascape
- 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - Three Tall Women
- 1996 National Medal of Arts
- 2002 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play - The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
- 2002 Tony Award for Best Play - The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
- 2005 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement
- 2005 Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
- 2008 Drama Desk Award Special Award
- 2011 Edward MacDowell Medal for Lifetime Achievement
- 2011 Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement, Lambda Literary Foundation
- Nominations
- 1964 Tony Award for Best Play - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
- 1965 Tony Award for Best Author of a Play - Tiny Alice
- 1965 Tony Award for Best Play - Tiny Alice
- 1967 Tony Award for Best Play - A Delicate Balance
- 1975 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play - Seascape
- 1975 Tony Award for Best Play - Seascape
- 1976 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Director of a Play - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- 1994 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Play - Three Tall Women
- 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - The Play About the Baby
- 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
- 2005 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Pulitzer Prize committee for the Best Play in 1963 recommended Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the Pulitzer board, who have sole discretion in awarding the prize, rejected the recommendation, due to the play's perceived vulgarity, and no award was given that year.[9]
References
- ^ Biography and Video Interview of Edward Albee at Academy of Achievement
- ^ "Albee interview", The Charlie Rose Show, May 27, 2008
- ^ Dramatists Play Service
- ^ "Who's Afraid of Edward Albee?", Metroweekly, March 10, 2011.
- ^ "Playwright Edward Albee defends 'gay writer' remarks.", National Public Radio, June 6, 2011.
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterA.pdf. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
- ^ Edward Albee Interview - page 6 / 6 - Academy of Achievement
- ^ Green, Jesse (11 November 2007). "Albee the Enigma, Now the Inescapable". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/theater/11gree.html?ref=arts.
- ^ Klein, Alvin. "Albee's 'Tiny Alice', The Whole Enchilada", The New York Times, 24 May 1998: CT11.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Edward Albee |
- Edward F. Albee Foundation
- Edward Albee at the Internet Broadway Database
- Edward Albee at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- Edward Albee at the Internet Movie Database
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Edward Albee on Charlie Rose
- Works by or about Edward Albee in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Edward Albee collected news and commentary at The Guardian
- Edward Albee collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Guardian (UK) Profile of Edward Albee, The Guardian, 2004
- William Flanagan (Fall 1966). "Edward Albee, The Art of Theater No. 4". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4350.*"Interviews with Edward Albee", TonyAwards
- Notes on a Colloquy with Edward Albee, Artslynx
- Performance by Edward Albee, Long House Theatre
- Cherry Lane Theatre website
- "The Friars Club"
- Who's afraid of Edward Albee, Laura Parker, Intelligent Life, 2009
- Solomon, Rakesh H. Albee in Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
- Albee with Joe Cino at benefit for the Caffe Cino
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Copyrights:
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
Oxford Companion to American Theatre
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.
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American Heritage Dictionary
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Read more
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Read more
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Fine Arts
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Read more
Mentioned in
Taylor, Elizabeth
(Fine Arts)
All Over
(1976 Theater Film)
Will Carleton
(literature)
Perfect Moment
(1997 Culture & Society Film)
The American Dream
(American Theater)
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