Culture

Pulitzer-win­ning play­wright Ed­ward Al­bee dies at 88 at his NY home: re­ports

• Bookmarks: 7


Edward Albee arrives on the red carpet for the Kennedy Center Honors at the Kennedy Center in Washington, December 5, 2010. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, whose provocative and often brutal look at American life in works such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” earned him a reputation as one of the greatest American dramatists, died on Friday in Montauk, New York. He was 88.

By Bill Trott and Leslie Adler

He died in the late af­ter­noon at his sum­mer home in Mon­tauk, a sea­side fish­ing ham­let on the east­ern tip of Long Is­land, af­ter suf­fer­ing a short ill­ness to which he ap­par­ently suc­cumbed, Al­bee’s as­sis­tant, Jakob Holder, told Reuters.

Holder said the play­wright was not alone at the time of his death, but de­clined to fur­nish any fur­ther de­tails.

Al­bee once told the Paris Re­view that he de­cided at age 6 that he was a writer but chose to work in the for­mat of plays af­ter con­clud­ing he was not a very good poet or nov­el­ist. His works would even­tu­ally rank him along­side Ten­nessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eu­gene O’Neill in Amer­i­can drama. 

Al­bee de­scribed a play­wright as “some­one who lets his guts hang out on the stage,” and the in­nards of his own works in­cluded a pow­er­ful anger as he pushed themes such as alien­ation, re­sent­ment and the dark un­der­side of life in the 1950s.

In the pref­ace to his play “Amer­i­can Dream,” Al­bee de­scribed his ap­proach as “an ex­am­i­na­tion of the Amer­i­can Scene … a con­dem­na­tion of com­pla­cency, cru­elty, emas­cu­la­tion, and vacu­ity … a stand against the fic­tion that every­thing in this slip­ping land of ours is peachy-keen.”

The harsh hu­mor and fe­roc­ity that pre­vailed in his more than 25 works long di­vided crit­ics and au­di­ences, earn­ing Al­bee as much con­dem­na­tion as praise. He al­ways re­turned the vol­ley of at­tacks, call­ing his crit­ics fools and his Broad­way au­di­ences “placid cows.”

“Art should ex­pand the bound­aries of the form and, si­mul­ta­ne­ously, it should change our per­cep­tions,” he told his bi­og­ra­pher. “I de­spise rest­ful art.”

SNUBBED, THEN AC­CLAIMED BY PULITZERS

Al­bee made his name, and shocked au­di­ences, when his scathing drama “Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf?” opened on Broad­way in 1962. Ac­tors Arthur Hill and Uta Ha­gen starred as a mar­ried cou­ple, George and Martha, who in­vite two friends over for an evening that de­te­ri­o­rates amid vit­riol, drunk­en­ness, pro­fan­ity, emas­cu­la­tion, cruel mind games and phys­i­cal abuse.

Al­bee said he took the name for his best-known work from a bit of graf­fiti scrawled in soap on the mir­ror of one of his fa­vorite Green­wich Vil­lage bars.   

The orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion ran for 644 per­for­mances on Broad­way. It went on to win a Tony Award for best play, spawned two suc­cess­ful Broad­way re­vivals and was made into a pop­u­lar movie in 1966 that fea­tured Os­car-win­ning per­for­mances by Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor, who starred op­po­site Richard Bur­ton, and Sandy Den­nis.

Al­though the stage ver­sion was se­lected by a Pulitzer Prize jury for the 1963 drama award, the Pulitzer ad­vi­sory board over­ruled the ju­rors be­cause of the play’s con­tro­ver­sial na­ture.

No drama prize was given that year, but Al­bee went on to win three Pulitzers, in 1967 for “A Del­i­cate Bal­ance,” in 1975 for “Seascape,” and in 1991 for “Three Tall Women.”

Al­bee also won a 2002 Tony for “The Goat or Who Is Sylvia,” the story of an ar­chi­tect who falls in love with a goat, which marked Al­bee’s re­turn to Broad­way af­ter al­most 20 years. In 2005 he re­ceived a life­time achieve­ment Tony.

Al­bee was adopted shortly af­ter birth by a wealthy New York fam­ily that sent him to elite schools – two of which ex­pelled him – but he had no de­sire for so­cial sta­tus. His re­jec­tion of the fam­ily val­ues and pref­er­ence for an artis­tic lifestyle led to the clashes with his strong-willed mother that he chron­i­cled in “Three Tall Women,” his most au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal work.

Al­bee moved to New York’s Bo­hemian heart, Green­wich Vil­lage, at the age of 20 and worked a va­ri­ety of jobs, in­clud­ing telegram mes­sen­ger. He tried po­etry and fic­tion be­fore his first play, “The Zoo Story,” a one-act work about lone­li­ness and class sep­a­ra­tion, was staged in 1959.

Other noted works in­cluded “Seascape,” which Al­bee di­rected when it opened on Broad­way in 1974 and had an ab­sur­dist twist – an el­derly cou­ple are joined on the beach by two hu­man-sized talk­ing lizards as they con­sider their re­la­tion­ships.

“A Del­i­cate Bal­ance” also ex­am­ined un­easy fam­ily dy­nam­ics. Al­bee wrote the script for the movie ver­sion of “A Del­i­cate Bal­ance,” which starred Katharine Hep­burn, Lee Remick and Joseph Cot­ten.

Al­bee’s long-time part­ner, sculp­tor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005 at age 59.

(Writ­ing and re­port­ing by Bill Trott in Wash­ing­ton- Ad­di­tional re­port­ing by Leslie Adler in New York- Edit­ing by Steve Gor­man)

7 recommended
0 comments
0 notes
93 views

Write a comment...

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *