Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee IIIis an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His works are often considered as well-crafted, realistic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 March 1928
CountryUnited States of America
I've never seen it staged or on film, but the story is so intense that I could feel the adrenaline running through my body while reading it. There's this chest-tightening anxiety of being thrown into the middle of this conflict between the different characters. I also love the idea that you can be drawn in by hateful characters. It takes a very good writer to create a character that you despise, yet find engaging. And there's the twist of the imaginary child. As it develops, you realize what is actually going on beneath it all. It's shocking and pretty horrifying.
It's hard to explain, or even remember, it now. All four of them were down there underwater, but it's too complicated to go into. I thought it was better just to eliminate it. If it had been necessary, I wouldn't have been able to cut it so easily. It still exists. It's probably in The Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library, but it can't be performed.
Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential.'
I think there are perhaps four playwrights of the 20th century that we could not have done without: Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett. If you've got those four, you've got the century covered.
I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.
The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.
A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.
In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. The involvement is terribly intense.
The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.
The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.
As a fairly objective judgment, I do think that my plays as they come out are better than most other things that are put on the same year. But that doesn't make them very good necessarily.
I don't like the climate in which writers have to work in the USA and I think it's my responsibility to talk about it.