Edward Albee, the great American playwright, died at 88 on Sept. 16, after a short illness, at his home in Montauk, NY. His 50-year career produced two masterpieces, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance . Two more works remain an essential part of the canon: Zoo Story, often cited as the best one-act American play, and Three Tall Women, his autobiographical tour de force.
From the beginning, critics were split between ecstatic praise and raging denunciation, rarely in-between. There is little doubt Albee permanently changed drama by inventing a new language, according to playwright Terence McNally, his partner in the 1960s. This language was profane yet poetically surreal, as opposed to the elegiac lyricism of Tennessee Williams. Albee was influenced primarily by the theater of the absurd, especially Ionesco and Beckett, which at its roots was experimental and iconoclastic.
Perhaps the opaque quality of Albee's plays has its origin in his troubled family life. He was adopted at three weeks. Neither of his parents were warm or nurturing: his father an absent womanizer, and his mother critical and self-absorbed. They were wealthy, and he became the enfant terrible of elite private schools. He graduated from the prestigious Choate in Connecticut, where his artistic ambitions were nurtured. He knew he was homosexual at 8, and had his first gay sex at 12. He was kicked out of Hartford College after a year for not attending classes and chapel. He fled to Greenwich Village to pursue a writing career, but neither poetry nor short stories were the right medium for him. Thornton Wilder encouraged him to write plays.
Zoo Story, produced in 1960, about an explosive park bench encounter between the angry Jerry and the well-adjusted Peter, sparked the Off-Broadway movement as a home for serious subjects. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) was a revelation of his talent. He dissected American life in the form of a bitter academic couple �" George, a history professor; and his wife Martha, the daughter of the college president �" during an alcohol-fueled night of combat and sadistic psychological games, harrowing and enthralling, as they entertain a younger couple, Nick and Honey. It was made into a 1966 film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, each giving the greatest performance of their careers in an adaptation that's one of the best transfers of a play to the screen in cinema history. Dysfunctional families would be his muse for his other magnum opus and Pulitzer in that decade, A Delicate Balance (1966), concerning a long-married couple, Agnes and Tobias, whose terrified neighbors want to move in with them, a standoff showing the huge emotional price people are willing to pay to stay together.
Although he won his second Pulitzer for the bizarre Seascapes (1975), in which talking sea lizards encounter a couple on a beach, Albee entered an almost 20-year decline due mainly to his battle with alcoholism, though he continued writing. His lifetime companion, Jonathan Thomas, a Canadian sculptor almost 20 years his junior, helped him give up booze. Albee later admitted he would have died if it weren't for Thomas. Albee was reckoned a has-been past his prime, but starting in the early 1990s with revivals of his earlier plays (Tiny Alice and Lady from Dubuque were positively reevaluated), then Three Tall Women (1994), he staged the greatest comeback in dramatic history, with the best reviews of his career and another Pulitzer. TTW was based on memories of his adoptive mother. He explored how she became the person she was, with three actresses playing her in youth, middle age, and near death at 90. Albee continued his professional renaissance with The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), detailing a passionate love affair between a married man and a goat named Sylvia. It won the Tony Award for Best Play. In 2005, Albee was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Tony, having already won the Kennedy Center honor in 1996.
Openly gay for decades, Albee was attacked for not writing on LGBT themes. His only gay character was the silent rejected son scorned by his mother in Three Tall Women. Albee felt topical issues dated plays, and he disdained ghettoization in any form. He spurned the label "gay playwright." Albee believed the universal ideas he wrote about, such as cruelty and death, applied as much to gay people as it did to straights. Dissident critics interpreted Virginia Woolf as pertaining to four homosexual men, but Albee stopped any all-male productions, terming them ludicrous since it involved Martha's hysterical pregnancy. But it can be argued that Albee was a queer writer long before the term became au courant. His themes of exposing dark secrets, challenging people to live outside their comfort zone, finding your inner truth, stripping away false illusions, and not being constrained by social norms, all have a deep gay resonance.
Albee's voice was angry, satirical, unnerving, and exhilarating, balancing tragedy with savage wit. He didn't care if audiences liked his plays or left outraged. His view of commercial theater and critics was dismal. Albee held up a mirror for us to face up to our human condition, to pay attention to the fears, violence, and darkness lurking underneath the veneer of contemporary life. His plays will continue to be produced for time immemorial.