Albee, Edward Franklin

Albee, Edward Franklin (1928– ), American dramatist, grandson (by adoption) of Edward Franklin Albee (1857–1930), who in 1920 owned a circuit of some 70 vaudeville houses, with an interest in about 300 others. The younger Albee, one of the few major dramatists to emerge in the United States in the 1960s, had his first play, a one-acter entitled The Zoo Story, performed in 1959 in Berlin (NY and London, 1960). It was followed by several other short plays, including The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) and The American Dream (1961). In 1962 he scored a Broadway success with his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (London, 1964), about a night of conflict between an ineffectual professor and his sharptongued wife. The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963; London, 1969), based on a novel by Carson McCullers, was followed by Tiny Alice (1964; RSC, 1970), which was declared by six New York critics to be incomprehensible, and the Pulitzer Prize-winner A Delicate Balance (1966; RSC, 1969), in which the lives of a middle-aged couple are disrupted by the simultaneous crises of a sister, a daughter, and friends. All Over (1971; RSC, 1972), concerning quarrels at a dying man's bedside, was another caustic look at family relationships. Seascape (1975), which the author directed, depicts a seashore encounter between two couples undergoing a process of self-assessment—one human, the other belonging to the lizard family. Seascape won another Pulitzer Prize, but Albee's later work found little favour. The Lady from Dubuque (1980) and Lolita (1981), adapted from Nabokov's novel, had only brief runs in New York, as did The Man Who Had 3 Arms (1983). The last—in which the protagonist's three arms brought him short-lived fame, which vanished when the third arm withered—was considered an attack on critics who maintained that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was his only notable work.