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Edward Albee
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Edward Franklin Albee |
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Edward Albee |
Albee, Edward (ăl'bē), 1928-, American playwright, one of the leading dramatists of his generation, b. Washington, D.C. 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), and The Play about the Baby (1998). In 2002 two new Albee plays debuted, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, a Tony Award-winning family tragicomedy, and Occupant, a portrait of the artist Louise Nevelson.
Bibliography
See P. C. Kolin, Conversations with Edward Albee (1987); biography by M. Gussow (1999); studies by A. Paolucci (1972) and R. E. Amacher (1982).
Dictionary:
Al·bee (ôl'bē, ŏl'-, ăl'-)  , Edward Franklin
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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.
| Works: 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. |
| Fine Arts Dictionary: Albee, Edward |
A twentieth-century American playwright whose early plays reflected the influence of the
| Quotes By: 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: Edward Albee |
| Edward Albee | |
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 Edward Albee, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1961 |
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| Born | 12 March 1928 Washington D.C. |
| Occupation | Dramatist |
| Nationality | American |
| Writing 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 (2002) National Medal of Arts (1996) Special Tony Award (2005) |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Edward Franklin Albee III (pronounced /ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance and Seascape. 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 Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger American playwrights, such as Pulitzer Prize-winner 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).
Contents |
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 Rye Country Day School in New York, 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 graduated in 1945 at the age of 17. He enrolled in the graduate studies program at Choate prep school in 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.
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 frequently spoke at campuses and served as a distinguished professor at the University of Houston from 1989 to 2003.
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); 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).
Albee is the President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., which maintains the William Flanagan Creative Persons Center, a writers and artists colony in Montauk, New York. Albee's longtime partner, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died on May 2, 2005, from bladder cancer.
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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- "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."[3]
- "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."[4]
- "Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly."
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
- 2008 Drama Desk Award Special Award
- 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.[5]
References
- ^ "Edward Albee Interview", Academy of Achievement, June 2, 2005
- ^ "Albee interview", The Charlie Rose Show, May 27, 2008
- ^ Edward Albee Interview - page 6 / 6 - Academy of Achievement
- ^ Edward Albee - Me, Myself & I - Peter and Jerry - Theater - New York Times
- ^ Klein, Alvin. "Albee's 'Tiny Alice', The Whole Enchilada", The New York Times, 24 May 1998: CT11.
External links
- Edward Albee at the Internet Broadway Database
- Edward Albee at the Internet off-Broadway Database
- Edward Albee at the Internet Movie Database
- Guardian (UK) Profile of Edward Albee, The Guardian, 2004
- "Edward Albee", The Paris Review
- The William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center
- "Interviews with Edward Albee", TonyAwards
- Notes on a Colloquy with Edward Albee, Artslynx
- Performance by Edward Albee, Interview by Neal Marshad, Long House Theatre
- Cherry Lane Theatre website
- "The Friars Club"
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 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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Mentioned in
- Taylor, Elizabeth (Fine Arts)
- Tiny Alice (Sources) (play)
- Tiny Alice (Further Reading) (play)
- Seascape (Further Reading) (play)
- The Zoo Story (Sources) (play)
- A Delicate Balance (Further Reading) (play)
- All Over (1976 Theater Film)
- Three Tall Women (Further Reading) (play)
- A Delicate Balance (Sources) (play)
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Further Reading) (play)
- Three Tall Women (Sources) (play)
- Will Carleton (literature)
- Black Humor (literary term)
- Perfect Moment (1997 Culture & Society Film)
