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
adrenaline anxiety beneath body character conflict create drawn good hateful imaginary intense love middle reading realize running seen shocking staged takes thrown twist writer
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.
character writing reality
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.
character thinking play
There may be lots of questions that anybody - an actor or a director or anybody - can ask about a character in a play of mine that are not answered in the play, but if it's a question that I don't think is relevant, I don't bother about it. There's no reason to ask it.
character boys thinking
I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.
character play want
I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.
character reality everyday
I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.
character thinking action
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.
character people personality
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
character environment thesis
True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or less know what is going to happen in the play.
character writing play
What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.
character play two
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.
character unconscious
I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.
collection cut eliminate four hard public theatre york
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.