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 think it's for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than the play's merits or demerits. They must search their own souls, or whatever.
Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men--just not very important, if you know what I mean--doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.
Any definition which limits us is deplorable.
I imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less "creativity" the director need exert.
I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.
I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.
Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I finish writing it. If it weren't for the need to make a living, I don't know whether I'd have the plays produced.
George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: “Yes, this will do”. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving… me, and must be punished for it. George and Martha… Sad, sad, sad.
In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.
I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.
A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music.
I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.