Albee, Edward (Franklin)

Albee, Edward [Franklin] (1928–), after a troubled youth came in his early thirties to the beginning of his career as playwright. He quickly became a leading figure of the new drama of the absurd that mingles the realistic with fantasy to present a savagely satirical attack on spiritual sterility, blandness, conformity, and hypocrisy, and to summon up with deep feeling the tragedy of alienation. His first play, The Zoo Story (Berlin, 1959; New York, 1960), a one‐act drama, presents a young homosexual who, hating both the world he can't live in and the one he does inhabit, manages to trick an ordinary, middle‐aged, and innocent stranger whom he encounters in New York's Central Park into killing him. Another short play, The Death of Bessie Smith (Berlin, 1960; New York, 1961), treats the agony of the black blues singer's death after an auto accident as the counterpointed background for a horrid fight involving a nurse, an intern, and an orderly in the all‐white hospital to which she is brought. The Sandbox (1960) symbolically treats family relationships as Mommy and Daddy, tired of Grandma, an unusually vital person, leave her on a beach to be picked up by a young man representative of Death. The American Dream (1961), another play in one scene, again presents a grotesque comedy about a middle‐class Mommy and Daddy who tortured their adopted son to death because he seemed unlikely to grow up into the clean‐cut “American Dream” type of young man. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Albee's first three‐act play, presents an all‐night drinking bout of a middle‐aged professor and his wife, joined by a vacuous instructor and his silly wife, in which through horrid verbal torturing of one another they eventually achieve catharsis by exorcising their fixation about a nonexistent son, which the older couple had created to sustain themselves, an illustration of what Albee has called the need to “try to claw our way into compassion.” Tiny Alice (1965) is a more obscure and symbolic drama that presents the richest woman in the world corrupting a Catholic lay brother, whom she seduces, marries, and arranges to have murdered. In 1963 he dramatized Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café. His other adaptations are: James Purdy's Malcolm (1965), Giles Cooper's Everything in the Garden (1967), and Nabokov's Lolita (1981). A Delicate Balance (1966; Pulitzer Prize, 1967) depicts a family unhappily questing for love and purpose without success. In 1968 Albee produced Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse‐Tung, the former presenting a huge box on stage while the sole voice is an offstage monologue, and the latter presenting four characters who speak banal lines from Mao and the sentimental poet Will Carleton, the two linked dramas suggesting the lack of significant values in human relations. All Over (1971) treats the attitudes toward life of the diverse hangers‐on who gather at the deathbed of a so‐called great man. Seascape (1975) is a two‐act play abstractly presenting a seemingly average man and wife who on a deserted beach encounter a humanoid couple in an earlier stage of evolutionary development and through conversation gain insights into curiosities of human behavior and beliefs. The Lady from Dubuque (1979) presents three fiercely captious couples to whom the Lady from Dubuque (Death) will come. Counting the Ways (1977) and Listening (1977) are short plays in which respectively two and three characters discuss their relationships. Similarly, Finding the Sun (1982) and Walking (1984) are one‐act plays with some short scenes. The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983) is a full‐length three‐person rendition of a man called Himself who has a brief period of great prominence. Three Tall Women (1991, Pulitzer Prize) is a poetic play about three generations of women and their coming to terms with their pasts. He followed that success with Fragments (1993), The Play About the Baby (1997), The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? (2000), and Occupant (2001)