DRAGON: Remembering Edward Albee

Thursday, July 6, 2023

Remembering Edward Albee

Edward Albee

Remembering Edward Albee

BY Adam Green

September 17, 2016

Long considered the greatest living American playwright, Edward Albee died on Friday, at 88, at his home in Montauk, New York, leaving behind a body of work marked by its surreal imagination, savage wit, sulfurous view of human relations, and unflinching gaze into the existential abyss. Neil Simon he was not, though he shared his more box office–friendly contemporary’s gift for putting odd couples into comic—in his case, blackly comic—situations: A mild-mannered publishing executive and a desperate loner have a fatal encounter on a park bench (Zoo Story, 1959); a married man falls in love with a barnyard animal (The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?, 2002); an anthropomorphized reptile couple meets a pair of their human counterparts on the beach and sinks into despair at the ways of landlubbers (Seascape, 1974). Albee’s most famous—and most commercially successful—play, which also involves two married couples and generous helpings of scorn, is, of course, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The title is a play on the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” from the 1933 Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs. The implied answer is: Everybody. And Albee’s plays depict the desperate lengths to which we go in order to avoid confronting the big, bad wolf huffing and puffing at the door of our flimsy houses and the terrible damage we do to each other in the process. Albee’s characters may contort themselves into pretzels of self-deception, but the playwright insists that we do not, and his work repeatedly pushes audiences to confront truths and navigate terrains that they might have preferred to leave unexplored.

Albee, who was born in 1928, was the adoptive child of a wealthy couple, Reed and Frances Albee, of Larchmont, New York, and said that he perpetually felt like a visitor in their home. It was a fitting beginning for a playwright whose work took scabrous aim at the upper classes, depicting bourgeois life as a turbulent sea of venality and dread beneath a thin veneer of bland gentility, as in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1966 masterpiece, A Delicate Balance. (Albee won three Pulitzers and would have tied Eugene O’Neill’s record of four had the 1964 Pulitzer committee not overturned its jury’s recommendation to give that year’s prize to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) It’s also fitting that his first produced play, the one-act Zoo Story, had its premiere in Berlin on a bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. He shared Beckett’s absurdist sense of humor and bleak view of the human condition, if not his complete nihilism.

One of the ironies of being a playwright dedicated to chronicling the horrors of our mortal existence is that making art is a fundamentally hopeful, life-affirming process. (The exception that proves the rule is the playwright Sarah Kane, who shortly after completing her pitch-black cry of the soul, Psychosis: 4:48, took her own life.) The world depicted in Albee’s plays is depressing, even horrific, but the plays themselves have an extravagance of vigor, wit, and invention that is exhilarating. It seems clear from his own well-lived life that Albee never gave in to the despair embodied in his work. In the ’60s, he fell in love with the ocean vistas of Montauk and bought a house there, soon after using royalties from Virginia Woolf to establish his own foundation, the centerpiece of which is the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, more commonly known as “the Barn,” which continues to provide residencies for writers and artists, particularly those who are less well-known. And, despite his depiction of marriage as blood sport and the fragility of our human ties, he and his partner, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, stayed together for 35 years until Thomas’s death in 2005.

I knew Albee only tangentially, from the days of my childhood when my parents used to bring me along to his annual Labor Day parties, at which an improbable array of artists, writers, and celebrities mingled around his pool overlooking the ocean. I had one of the more surreal moments of my life at that party when I was 12 or so: Newly returned from tennis camp, I played a set on Albee’s court against the playwright James Kirkwood, while Albee and Kirkwood’s then-girlfriend Diana Ross looked on. With his piercing eyes, Buster Keaton deadpan, and notoriously acid intelligence, Albee was an imposing figure who scared the shit out of me. Once I finally summoned the mojo to speak with him, he turned out to be solicitous and friendly, and though he asked me questions about my favorite books and plays, my own discomfort obliged me to keep the conversations short. I saw him last at a Signature Theatre gala in 2012, looking frail and remote. I went over, explained who I was, and asked, “How’s life these days?” Pointing to his hearing aid, he asked me to repeat the question, which I did a few more times before he responded, “Well, obviously I can’t hear, I’ve got diabetes, I need a cane, and most of my closest friends have died—so, par for the course.” Seeing me fumble for a response, he gave me a thin smile and said, “On the other hand, I can still write, I’m at a party, and you look well. How’s your mom?”

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