Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation – whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth, and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life – has died, aged 88.
Albee’s career began after the death of Eugene O’Neill and after Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had produced most of their best-known plays. From them he inherited the torch of American drama.
He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, The Zoo Story opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, The Zoo Story zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench.
When the play came to the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village the next year, it helped propel the blossoming theatre movement that became known as off-Broadway.
In 1962, Albee's Broadway debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a famously scabrous portrait of a withered marriage, won a Tony Award for best play. It ran for more than a year and half – and enthralled and shocked theatregoers with its depiction of stifling academia and of a couple whose relationship has been corroded by dashed hopes, wounding recriminations and drink.
‘Shining medal’
The 1966 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, turned the play into Albee’s most famous work; it had, he wrote three decades later, “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous”.
But it stands as representative, too; an early example of the heightened naturalism he often ventured into, an expression of the viewpoint that self-interest is a universal, urgent, irresistible and poisonous agent in modern life.
A half-century later, Albee's audacious drama about a love affair between man and beast, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, won another Tony, ran for nearly a year.
In between, Albee turned out a parade of works, generally focused on exposing the darkest secrets of relatively well-to-do people, with lacerating portrayals of familial relations, social intercourse and individual soul-searching.
And yet he was among the most honoured of American dramatists. Beyond his Tonys – including one for lifetime achievement – he won three Pulitzer Prizes.
His major works included A Delicate Balance, All Over, Seascape, Three Tall Women and The Play About the Baby.
Albee explained himself as a kind of herald, perhaps a modern Cassandra warning the theatregoer of inevitable personal calamity.
"All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done," he said in a 1991 New York Times interview. "I find most people spend too much time living as if they're never going to die."
Correctives
He wrote, he said, with a sense of responsibility; “All plays, if they’re any good, are constructed as correctives,” he told the
Guardian
in 2004.
Albee was born in Virginiato Louise Harvey. In the 1999 biography, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, the author, Mel Gussow, cited adoption papers that said Edward's father "had deserted and abandoned both the mother and the child and had in no way contributed to the support of the child".
Sent to an adoption nursery before he was three weeks old, baby Edward was placed with Reed Albee, an heir to a chain of vaudeville theatres, and his wife, Frances, who lived in New York. The couple formally adopted Edward 10 months later.
Patrician and distant, the Albees were unsuited to dealing with a child of artistic temperament, and in later years Albee would recall an un-nourishing childhood in which he felt like an interloper in their home.
He attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, but never finished, reportedly because he refused to go to chapel and was expelled. In 1949, he moved to Greenwich Village, where his artistic life began in earnest.
It was a month before his 30th birthday, Gussow wrote in his biography, that Albee sat down at a typewriter borrowed from the Western Union office where he worked as a messenger, and completed The Zoo Story in 2½ weeks.
Following his early successes, ending with Seascape in 1975, he went into a decline, partly owing to struggles with alcohol, and for nearly 20 years he did not write a commercially successful play.
It was Three Tall Women in the early 1990s that returned Albee to prominence, and for the next 20 years he continued to be productive and witnessing (or directing himself) revivals of earlier plays on Broadway and in regional theatres.
Albee lived for several decades in a Manhattan loft filled with African sculptures and contemporary paintings by the likes of Vuillard, Milton Avery and Kandinsky. His partner of 35 years, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died in 2005. Albee leaves no immediate survivors.