Edward Albee, who has died aged 88, stood at the very forefront of the American theatre and was the last of his country’s great 20th-century playwriting pioneers who included Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller.
Of those men, Albee’s voice was perhaps the most singularly astringent, his dissection of such defining experiences for humankind as marriage and death tethered to a ferocious wit and the same verbal facility in his characters that the articulate, precisely spoken Albee enjoyed in his own life.
The winner of three Tony Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005) and as many Pulitzer prizes, Albee was best-known for his searing 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. A blistering portrait of a couple in meltdown and the lethal games they play in order to survive, the four-character drama was made into a film in 1966 (for which Albee, interestingly, did not write the screenplay) and is frequently revived the world over. Famously denied the Pulitzer prize for containing “elements of adultery” and being too profane, Virginia Woolf? remains the standard-bearer of Albee’s career.
Many rank his subsequent play A Delicate Balance (1966) as even greater in its merciless yet also caustically funny view of the abyss into which Albee’s characters seem always to be falling. It got a starry Broadway revival in 2014 with Glenn Close and John Lithgow heading the cast and is rarely long absent from the repertoire.
If Albee went through a mid-career dip in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, he came out the other side, winning some of the strongest reviews of his career for his 2002 Broadway play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, about a married man who falls in love with a goat; the play was seen in 2004 in London at the Almeida Theatre, which for a while became Albee’s unofficial British home. (The Play About the Baby had its world premiere there in 1998.)
In Albee’s later years, even some of his lesser-known work (such as the 1980 Broadway flop The Lady from Dubuque) was being significantly reappraised, confirming Albee’s firm belief that audiences and critics needed to catch up with his writing rather than the other way round.
Edward Franklin Albee was born Edward Harvey on March 12 1928 and adopted as an infant by a wealthy New York suburban couple, Reed and Frances Albee, for whom the playwright later expressed considerable contempt. Although his father had made a great deal of money in the theatre-owning business, neither parent approved of their son’s creative aspirations, preferring the more conventional path that Albee assiduously avoided in both his life and his art.
A rebel both at the elite Choate boarding school and then at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, which he left without graduating, by the age of 20 Albee had moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, having by that point severed all ties with his father and, for nearly two decades, with his mother.
The theatre community became Albee’s surrogate family as the writer fell in with the burgeoning Off Broadway movement at arguably its most fertile period of foment. Early one-act plays such as The Sandbox and The American Dream broke with naturalism, steeping themselves in the absurdist ethos of Ionesco and Beckett, while his defining 1958 play The Zoo Story was first staged not in America but at the Schiller Theatre in West Germany; when it was subsequently seen in New York in 1960, The Zoo Story appeared on an Off Broadway double-bill with Beckett’s solo play, Krapp’s Last Tape.
Its German debut, meanwhile, set a pattern of European premieres that was to continue, Albee often scorning the commercial dictates of Broadway in favour of a greater appreciation for the artistry of the playwright across the Atlantic: it’s telling that the author directed the world premiere of his own Marriage Play at the English Theatre in Vienna in 1987, some six years before it reached New York.
But it was on October 13 1962 and very much on Broadway that Albee’s career truly exploded. At a running time of nearly three hours and suffused with a sexual and linguistic candour that shook the mainstream theatre to its core, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened to rave reviews, The New York Times leading the way in its assessment that the evening “towers over the run of contemporary plays”.
Albee for his part avoided analysis of his own work beyond remarking in 1966 that “I wasn’t a very good poet and I wasn’t a very good novelist [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better."
The central characters of George, the hard-drinking university professor, and his harridan of a wife, Martha, entered the theatrical canon, their names evoking the American First Couple, George and Martha Washington, while coming to signify perhaps the most complete portrait yet seen on stage of a relationship at once necessary and destructive: these two may spend their long night’s journey into day braying at one another and taking their young, often terrified guests Nick and Honey with them.
But by play’s end, there could be no doubt that their partnership, however toxic, was also in some way essential, and the parts remained catnip for actors over time, including real-life couple Richard Burton and an Oscar-winning Elizabeth Taylor in the Mike Nichols film. Notable London productions featured Paul Eddington and Margaret Tyzack at the National Theatre in 1981; David Suchet and Diana Rigg at the Almeida Theatre and then on the West End in 1996; and Bill Irwin and the formidable Kathleen Turner on the West End in 2006. Tim Pigott-Smith and Clare Higgins led a well-received staging at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2014.
If Albee never again hit the popular nerve to quite that degree, his capacity for reinvention and renewal never left him. A Delicate Balance was seen by many to deepen the themes contained in Virginia Woolf, its defining couple, Tobias and Agnes, a quieter if no less lethally inclined version of George and Martha; that play, too, has been memorably performed in London across the years, most recently at the Almeida Theatre in 2011 with Pigott-Smith and Penelope Wilton leading the cast. (Tony Richardson directed a 1973 screen version, starring Paul Scofield and Katharine Hepburn.)
And while such plays as Tiny Alice (1964) and All Over (1971) toyed with theatrical form before a dedicated coterie, Albee came back into the critical and public fold with the 1994 Off Broadway premiere of Three Tall Women, which refracts the different phases of existence across characters known only as A, B and C and which spoke more directly than Albee had before to his own discomfiture as the gay son of a difficult mother.
“I’m not a character in any of my plays,” Albee remarked in 2003, “except that boy: that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.” London responded warmly to the piece, Maggie Smith leading two separate engagements and landing pride of place as Albee’s British interpreter of choice, with A Delicate Balance and The Lady from Dubuque among her West End credits.
Indeed, The Lady from Dubuque was just one of Albee’s earlier Broadway misfires to emerge with greater kudos some years on, though time has not yet been as kind to a pair of 1981 New York failures, Lolita (which starred Donald Sutherland and was adapted from the Vladmir Nabokov novel) and The Man Who Had Three Arms. The reactions to those plays’ quick demise fuelled Albee’s 1988 remark that “if Attila the Hun were alive today, he would be a drama critic”. But he was generally sanguine about how his work was received. “Careers are mysterious things,” he wrote in the preface to The Zoo Story. “They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.”
Albee’s last New York opening was the 2010 Off Broadway premiere of Me Myself & I, a play about twinning centred around two young men known as OTTO (all upper-case) and otto (all lower-case). A philosophical jape more interested in the intricacies of language than in plot, the play furthered Albee’s love of experimentation as reflects a man who over time won pretty well every theatrical award going including a National Medal of Arts prize in 1996 and the Edward MacDowall Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2011.
A gay man who rarely addressed homosexuality directly in his plays, he was adamant that the roles of George and Martha not be played by two men (as some productions had attempted) but by a man and a woman as written.
Albee’s longterm companion, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005. “The mourning never ends,” said Albee after his death. “It just changes.”
Edward Albee, born March 12 1928, died September 16 2016
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