For himself, Mr. Albee thinks that New York theater is “headed to hell in a handbasket”. While he looks around and sees a lot of awful good playwrights, he sees being a good playwright as almost a Sisyphean task in a world where art has been so utterly commercialized. He says damningly that this dumbing down is “the reason America will never be a great culture”. When the world pays more attention to the guidos and guidettes of Jersey Shore than the works of our cultural giants, it’s tempting to believe he’s right. Let’s hope he’s not.
But Mr. Albee can’t help himself. He continues to develop new talent and he has a new show of his own running at Playwright’s Horizon called “Me, Myself and I” (a play about identical twins both named Otto. A palindrome. Riddles again!). The audience at the talk may have been getting up in age, but hopefully Mr. Albee’s theatre and other offerings around the city continue to kindle the thirst for real, explorative culture in young people as NY theatre has done for decades.
