Anyone who’s read or seen an Albee play will recognize the absurdist elements, the drama that begins where it ends, the characters who circle around endlessly like lions in a cage. Albee characters sometimes inhabit theater Wonderlands where metaphor is ubiquitous—yet he also writes plays about modern families who do and say amazingly absurd things. They fight over imaginary children. They fall in love with goats. He pushes the expectations of the audience by pushing his own plays into unfamiliar territory, which he admits gives his plays “areas of virtue that do not allow them to become commercial successes” with both audiences and critics.
Mr. Albee is clearly proud of what he does though, the critics be damned, and the critics are not always kind. Mr. Albee told me that the critics “don’t read the plays”, so they don’t have the level of understanding they need. He illustrated this with a story about the critic John Simon, who found himself amazed to enjoy an Albee play he’d hated after seeing its second mounting. I get the complaint; John Simon is smart but he’s the sort of critic who hardly ever seems to ‘get it’. Albee was even more blunt. He called him an “asshole”.
Besides his bluntness, perhaps the most charming thing about Mr. Albee is that for all of his famous pushing of the envelope, he evidently has the greatest love for tradition. He’s long been a teacher of drama and he cited Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ as his favorite play, calling it the greatest of American plays. He spends a lot of his time in Montauk, NY, where he runs the Edward F. Albee Foundation, a program dedicated to bringing together and fostering the talents of artists of all stripes, from writers and actors to painters and sculptors. (http://www.albeefoundation.org/).
