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The Tender Side of Edward Albee

Edward Albee in England, circa 1967

The Tender Side of Edward Albee

December 1, 2016

The playwright Edward Albee died in September, and the New York theater community is celebrating his life and work in an event open to the public at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, at the August Wilson Theater. Here, four people who crossed paths with this famously irascible writer recall him as a friend, a mentor and an inspiration.

The Television Writer: Tom Donaghy

“He was, I came to realize, trying to cultivate taste.”

I met Edward Albee when I was in my early 20s. I had just graduated from N.Y.U., where I’d studied to be an actor. Someone who knew Albee told me he was looking for an assistant, and suggested I put myself up for the job.

I revered Albee. The movie of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was my gateway drug. George and Martha’s existential slalom from dusk to dawn somehow made deep, real sense to a gay suburban teenager huddled in his basement watching television.

The interview was held in Albee’s TriBeCa loft, stuffed floor to ceiling with art. Kandinsky, Chagall, Picasso. The great man sat among them — that legendary twinkle in his eye, his Irish wolfhounds at his feet.

There is nothing quite like meeting one of your idols in his own home. You think: This person living and breathing in front of me wakes up in the space where I’m greeting him, then goes on to make plays that shape the world. It’s a good kind of awe to feel when you’re young and ambitious. Daunting and galvanizing in equal measure.

At the time, he was out of critical favor. It didn’t seem to be affecting him much. Yes, he mentioned it. But with a wry smile, full of a sly bemusement, as if he were thinking, “Isn’t life odd that I would be treated so?” Otherwise, he was cheerful, talking about his travels and African art, and about the theater he was attending almost every night. He was up on all the new plays and playwrights.

He also talked about his childhood love of vaudeville — which was his family’s business — the theater of the absurd, musical revues, O’Neill, Genet. His tastes were extremely catholic.

I was mesmerized. I had recently decided I no longer wanted to be an actor and yet had zero idea what my next move would be. I was interning at Mabou Mines but was also drawn to Bunraku, anything at Dance Theater Workshop, as well as the plays of Churchill, Mamet, Orton, Wilson.

In the still, quiet space, with the afternoon light coming in from Harrison Street, I could tell he was measuring my words. Finally, he reached a verdict. “I don’t think you want to be my assistant. But you might want to be a playwright.”

The thought had never occurred to me.

I began writing plays.

Years later, I found out that Albee, whose early goal was to be a poet, had shown his poems to Thornton Wilder. Wilder apparently read each carefully, then suggested Albee write plays instead. Now, my playwriting career was not what Albee’s was to Wilder’s, but Albee had somehow seen something in me that I had not yet seen in myself. This was another gift from Albee. Who soon became “Edward.”

He helped me get a fellowship to his foundation in Montauk, where writers and visual artists spend the summer in Spartan rooms carved out of an old barn. He would come by every morning with the mail, and to chat. He wanted to know what we were reading. He approved of my deep dive into Franz Xaver Kroetz. He made a face when I mentioned Barbara Pym. He was, I came to realize, trying to cultivate taste.

He spoke with contempt about Hollywood and the writers who went there. TV had yet to begin its renaissance, and Hollywood was a place where writers slouched in disgrace. I held my tongue. I never revealed my admiration for Mike Nichols’s work on “Virginia Woolf,” especially knowing how Edward had frowned on the film’s “hopeful” ending, its “sentimental” score.

I never mentioned I wished more of his plays had been made into movies in that jaggedy, in-your-face Cassavetes style. That there was something exhilarating about being trapped with those monsters, and their words, in those fat, messy close-ups. Each word of dialogue measured for its vitality, its maximum punch. For its ability to do damage. To wake people up to themselves.

As I write this from Los Angeles, where I now write for television, I often think of those words, his awareness of their currency and energy, their ultimate economy. This is precisely what’s needed on the small screen. It’s also what Edward Albee began encouraging in me from our first meeting.

Tom Donaghy is a co-creator of “Star,” a Fox series that has its premiere Dec. 14.

The Producer: Elizabeth Ireland McCann

“Onward, Edward.”

It was 1994 when I called upon the playwright at his loft on Harrison Street. We had never met. My mission was to get the rights to “Three Tall Women” for a commercial transfer. I prevailed, produced the show Off Broadway and eventually on a national tour, and ended up producing it on the West End as well.

After that, there were revivals of Edward’s plays and new plays — including “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” — on Broadway, Off Broadway and in London. And after every opening, I received a card from him with the simple message, “ONWARD, EDWARD.” Eventually he added the word love.

In the last years of his life, there was an ebb and flow to his memory. But the noble mind was not overthrown. In August, I visited him at his Montauk home, which years before Uta Hagen had encouraged him to buy. Mercedes Ruehl was there, and his devoted caretaker, ironically named Martha.

It was a beautiful late summer day. As I began to leave, I uncharacteristically leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “I love you,” I said. He grasped my hand, staring in my eyes intently and whispering softly, said, “ONWARD.”

Elizabeth Ireland McCann has produced more than 40 shows in New York and London.

The Actor: Mercedes Ruehl

“To kiss or not to kiss?”

I first met Edward Albee when his good friend Irene Worth, knowing how greatly I admired him — venerated him really — took me to his annual Christmas party. Desperately did I try to fascinate that night; dismally did I fail. A second encounter ended just as badly when I was called to read for his new play a year later and acquitted myself so miserably that I wound up on the street in tears.

There is no dejection worse than the one that comes with the death of a dream. So it was an utterly unexpected dropped-from-heaven day when I was offered the part of Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opposite Patrick Stewart at the Guthrie Theater. Albee had somehow — had he mistaken me for someone else? — approved!

Edward Albee

The night of the first performance (the only one Albee would attend), I waited in the wings with Patrick and wondered what on earth had ever led me to chose acting as the thing to do with my life.

I have no idea how I did — what I did — or how I survived — but three hours after the curtain came up, it went down — and I found myself dazed and exhausted and very much alone in a chilly dressing room in the basement of that old theater.

A knock at the door.

I opened it, and there he was. The big small man himself. He held his arms out for a hug, and I walked into them expecting something stiff and brief and found myself instead in a genuine embrace — strong and truly felt, even lingering — for a moment. My face somehow got tucked in his neck, and I thought: to kiss or not to kiss? I kissed.

I immediately drew back aghast. My God, that was inappropriate, I thought — just wrong! But no — a pleased and open face was looking at me. A pause. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I stammered. “No,” he smiled and moved into the room, “that was good.” I only discovered later that this was considerable praise.

He sat. We spoke for a while. At first, I was terribly awkward, but as he clearly had settled in to wait out my awkwardness, I relaxed. More than the words that were said I remember a feeling of warmth crept into the room — like being by a campfire on a cold night — the kind of conversation you can have under such conditions. When he got up to leave, he turned to me and said about Martha: “Remember: She loved her father very much.” Another quick kiss and he was gone.

I sat down at my dressing table and thought: It will take you a long time to parse what has happened to you tonight.

And thus my friendship with Edward began.

Mercedes Ruehl, a Tony- and Oscar-winning actress, starred in “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” on Broadway.

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The Playwright: Will Eno
“A spokesman for our animal needs.”

I first met Edward in June 1996, when I was a fellow at the Albee Foundation in Montauk. You’d sometimes spot him out in the yard, coiling up a garden hose or poking a stick at something. Life at the Barn is fairly quiet, so it was fun to see a famous playwright dragging a branch by the window or staring up into a tree.

One day, I was out not-writing on the porch, and Edward came over and sat down. We didn’t say very much. The local dog, Ziggy, was sitting with us on the porch. “Who’s a good dog?” Edward finally asked Ziggy, in a kind of schoolmasterly way. “You’re a good dog,” I told Ziggy, after a suitable pause, completing the circle.

This was, to me, a familiarly New Englandish way to connect; there were a number of dogs in my youth through which a lot of the family’s feelings flowed. Things can get lost or go astray when you’re relaying them through a dog, but with Edward, you felt a kind of clarity and ease when an animal was around. That a dog might suddenly bear its teeth or run off barking is only proof of its trustworthiness.

Some version of that porch scene happened a lot, over the years: Edward and an animal and I, sitting somewhere, not saying too much but feeling, if I may speak for the other two, cared-for and calm. There was Edward’s little cat, Snow, and a student’s dog in Omaha that would eat grapes if you had grapes. We saw an owl one day in Houston. “He should be sleeping,” Edward said, like he was about to do something about it. I once heard Edward read “Krapp’s Last Tape” and, in an all-around gorgeous rendering, he rose particularly to the line, “Let me in.” You’re free to picture a dog on the other side of a screen door, but of course you don’t have to.

Part of me just wants to write, “Edward wore a lot of scratchy-looking wool shirts and pants and I miss him.”

It’s not by accident Edward wrote “The Goat,” “The Zoo Story” or “Seascape,” with its two lizards, Sarah and Leslie. In fact, in all of his plays the animal is pretty prominent, somehow or other. I don’t know what the first year of Edward’s life was like, but it sounded pretty hectic. Maybe that lack of calm somehow enabled him to become the soothing presence he was to the critters around him, and such an elegant spokesman for our simple animal needs, and such a howling voice for a hard kind of honesty.

Will Eno’s new play, “Wakey, Wakey,” is to open at the Signature Theater in the spring.

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 4, 2016, Section AR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Tender Side of Edward Albee.

THE NEW YORK TIMES