Albee, Edward 1928-

ALBEE, EDWARD 1928-

Playwright

Early Promise

Playwright Edward Albee stood out in the midst of what many critics saw as a drearyperiodforAmericantheater in the 1960s. His one-act plays The Zoo Story (1960), The Sandbox (1960), The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), and The American Dream (1961) were critical and commercial Off-Broadway successes, and then he im-pressed everyone with his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1962). Starring Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill as Martha and George, it ran for 644 performances on Broadway and was launched on an international tour.

Later Developments

His reputation was further enhanced by his 1962 stage adaptation of Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, which opened on Broadway the following year. After Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'? Albee was the most sought-after playwright in America: he took part in an Off-Broadway production of Ugo Betti's Corruption in the Palace of Justice in 1963 and was said to be working on two plays, a novel, and an opera simultaneously. The experience was a heady one for a young playwright whose first work had appeared only five years earlier. Before that, he had attended various private schools and college (without graduating) and had worked at odd jobs. Indeed, it appeared as if his youthful promise had been exhausted in the early 1960s, a perception negated in part by the successful 167-performance run of his play Tiny Alice from 1964 to 1965 and by A Delicate Balance (1966), hailed by many as the outstanding American play in 1966 (it received the Pulitzer Prize for drama) but criticized by several observers. It fared better, however, than his dramatization of James Purdy's novel Malcolm, which appeared early in 1966 and was withdrawn after seven performances.

Reputation

With plays such as Box (1968) and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968) Albee was identified with the theater of the absurd, whose vogue helped his reputation somewhat. Despite writing two Pulitzer Prize winning plays since the 1960s, his popularity has never been as high as it was in the early 1960s.

Sources:

Richard E. Amacher, Edward Albee, revised edition (Boston: Twayne, 1982);

Matthew Charles Roudane, Understanding Edward Albee (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987).