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)

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).

Albee, Edward [Franklin, III] (b. 1928), playwright. The adopted grandson of the vaudeville magnate E. F. Albee, he was born in Washington, D. C., and suffered an unhappy youth, which included being enrolled and removed from a number of schools, briefly attending Trinity College, and assuming a series of odd jobs that ranged from Western Union delivery boy to salesclerk. When early attempts at writing poetry were unrewarding, he turned to playwriting at the suggestion of Thornton Wilder. His first play, The Zoo Story, was initially produced in Germany in 1959, then in America a year later. In The Sandbox (1960), he tells how an exasperated Mommy and Daddy leave Grandma on a beach to await the coming of Death in the guise of a young boy. The American Dream (1961), in which parents kill their disappointing child, and The Death of Bessie Smith (1961), a dramatization of the singer's last hours, were well received. His study of a troubled marriage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), was roundly praised and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the next year saw his adaptation of Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café reach Broadway. Critics and audiences alike were baffled by Tiny Alice (1964), in which the richest woman in the world seduces and destroys a Catholic lay brother. In 1966 his dramatization of a novel, Malcolm, and his libretto for Breakfast at Tiffany's were unfavorably received, but A Delicate Balance had a modest run. A series of interesting failures followed: Everything in the Garden (1967), All Over (1971), Seascape (1975), The Lady from Dubuque (1980), and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983). Albee's career took a positive turn with the award‐winning Three Tall Women (1994), followed by the well‐received The Play About the Baby (2001) and The Goat (2002). Albee's plays have dealt with his unique miasma of fantasy and reality, and his figures' inability to come to terms with this sometimes frightening combination. His bent has been largely confrontational and philosophic, but beneath his work lies a disturbed sexuality. Biography: Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, Mel Gussow, 2000.

Edward Albee , 1928–, American playwright, one of the leading dramatists of his generation, b. Washington, D.C., as Edward Harvey. Much of his most characteristic work constitutes an absurdist commentary on American life. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962, film 1966), a Tony Award–winner that is generally regarded as his finest play, presents an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-aged professor and his wife verbally lacerate each other in brilliant colloquial language. His major early plays include The Zoo Story (1959), The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), The Sandbox (1960), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963, adapted from the novel by Carson McCullers ), and Tiny Alice (1965). Albee won the Pulitzer Prize for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). Other later plays include The Lady from Dubuque (1980), Marriage Play (1987), The Play about the Baby (1998), the Tony Award–winning family tragicomedy The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), Occupant, a portrait of the artist Louise Nevelson (2002), and the semiautobiographical Me, Myself & I (2008).

Bibliography: See P. C. Kolin, Conversations with Edward Albee (1987); biography by M. Gussow (1999); studies by A. Paolucci (1972), R. E. Amacher (1982), and R. H. Solomon (2010).

Albee, Edward (Franklin) (1928– ), American playwright, associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, whose later explorations of sexual fantasy, frustration, and domestic anguish also recall the plays of T. Williams. His works include the macabre one-act satiric comedy The American Dream (1961); the more naturalistic marital tragi-comedy of academe Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962); Tiny Alice (1965); and A Delicate Balance (1966), a tragi-comedy set in a hard-drinking domestic environment. Later plays include All Over (1971); Seascape (1975); The Lady From Dubuque (1980); The Man Who Had Three Arms (1982); Marriage Play (1986); Three Tall Women (1992), the leading character of which was based on Albee's adoptive mother; and The Goat (2002) which, like most of his work, is both shocking and funny.

Albee, Edward Franklin (1928– ) US playwright. Albee's debut play The Zoo Story (1959) is a classic text of the Theatre of the Absurd. His best-known play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is an intense portrait of a destructive marriage. Other works include The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963). A Delicate Balance (1966) and Seascape (1975) won Pulitzer Prizes.