Edward Albee, Pulitzer-winning playwright and ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ author, dies at 88
Edward Albee, the award-winning playwright who instilled fire-breathing life into George and Martha, the iconic, middle-aged couple who made his best-known play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a clenched battleground of love-hate matrimony, has died. He was 88.
Personal assistant Jacob Holder said the playwright died on Friday at his home on Long Island, according to the Associated Press. No cause of death has been given.
Albee won the Pulitzer Prize for drama three times – though not for Virginia Woolf – during a long, protean, sometimes experimental playwriting career. Despite his standing as one of the leading literary figures of his time, he rarely gained universal acclaim from the critics, and he was not shy about returning his detractors’ volleys. He typically wrote about the Northeastern suburban upper-crust in which he was raised, aiming to provoke audiences rather than reward them with comfortable pleasures.
“A play, at its very best, is an act of aggression against the status quo,” he told a group of aspiring teen-aged playwrights in San Diego in 1989.
From the start of his career in 1958 at age 30, Albee resisted stasis in his own work, which went through frequent swerves of subject and style. From his imagination sprang some of the theatre’s strangest scenarios – for example, the undistinguished fellow who becomes a celebrity by growing an extra limb in The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983), and the two lizards who crawl out of the ocean in Seascape (1975) to converse with a couple lying on a beach and trying to sort out what to do with themselves now that they’re retired.
After Albee’s initial series of successes – The Zoo Story, an off-Broadway hit in 1960; Virginia Woolf, which ran on Broadway for 19 months in 1962-64; and A Delicate Balance, which won the Pulitzer in 1967 – the playwright’s critics complained that his themes became abstruse, his symbols too heavy and his language too rarefied.
For a long stretch from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, he wrote steadily – except when alcoholism sidetracked him for a time in the 1970s – and even won a Pulitzer for Seascape in 1975. But he was largely out of favour.
The drought ended with his third Pulitzer in 1994 for Three Tall Women, the story of his mother, followed in 1996 by an acclaimed Broadway revival of A Delicate Balance, the elegant but unsettling drama about the accommodations a family makes to stay together, albeit unhappily.
Even Tiny Alice, the 1964 play that took a radical turn toward the symbolic after the earthy Virginia Woolf, was appreciated anew in a late 90s revival. During its initial run, Albee had insisted that Tiny Alice was perfectly intelligible so long as audiences tuned out critics who declared it impossible to understand.
“Some critics are just morons by nature,” Albee told The New York Times years later. “Others are there to save the audience from any interesting experience.”
In 2002, well into his 70s, Albee was still going for the unexpected: His play The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia” concerned an acclaimed, happily-married architect who throws his life into turmoil by falling into a torrid sexual affair with a goat named Sylvia.
“With any luck, there will be people standing up, shaking their fists during the performance and throwing things at the stage,” Albee told Steven Drukman in Interview magazine. “I hope so!”
The Goat earned Albee a best-play Tony Award, the second of his career – 39 years after “Virginia Woolf yielded the first.
Albee (pronounced AWL-bee) was born March 12, 1928, in Washington, DC, to Louise Harvey, who, having been deserted by the baby’s father, gave her son up for adoption two weeks later, according to Albee biographer Mel Gussow.
Soon the infant was swaddled in luxury in Larchmont, New York, the son of Reed and Frances “Frankie” Albee, a childless couple. They named him Edward Franklin Albee III after his adoptive grandfather, who had made a fortune as the magnate of a national chain of vaudeville theatres.
It was the antithesis of a warm, nurturing home.
“Frankie was imperious, demanding and unloving,” Gussow wrote in Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (1999). “Reed was uncommunicative and disengaged.”
The youngster did have a household ally in his maternal grandmother, whom he portrayed sympathetically in two early plays, Sandbox and The American Dream.
Albee recalled being chauffeured to his first play as a small boy in one of the family’s two Rolls-Royces. The play was Jumbo, in which Jimmy Durante was followed around the stage by a live elephant.
At 6, Albee said, he knew he wanted to be a writer. But his academic career was fairly disastrous – a series of private schools that bounced him for lack of motivation, and a hellish, year-long stint in a Pennsylvania military academy.
Albee found a niche at Choate, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, where he wrote poems and plays and attempted the first of two youthful, never-published novels. He washed out of Trinity College in Hartford after a year and a half, dismissed for failing to attend classes and chapel.
Albee moved home to Larchmont but soon left for Greenwich Village, in 1949, severing ties with his family that wouldn’t be renewed for 17 years – and then, according to his interviews, without any real intimacy. His father died in 1961; Albee, who did not attend his funeral, described him as “somebody I never knew”.
In 1952, Albee, an openly gay man throughout his adulthood, moved in with composer William Flanagan. Albee worked odd jobs, the steadiest delivering telegrams. Meanwhile, he wrote without accomplishing much and found himself on the verge of 30 and, as Gussow quoted him, “fed up with everything, including myself”.
At that point, The Zoo Story poured out of him, written on a typewriter he had swiped from Western Union. This strange, one-act play concerned a slow-building, ultimately explosive park bench encounter in which alienated Jerry accosts placid, apparently well-adjusted Peter and refuses to be shrugged off.
More short plays followed, including The American Dream, one of several scripts Albee would weave from the troubled strands of his boyhood home life.
The Zoo Story arrived in New York in 1960, after premiering in 1959 in a German translation in West Berlin, and Albee instantly became point man for the emerging Off-Broadway theatre movement marked by plays darker and grittier than the gift-wrapped affirmations typical of commercial Broadway.
