It was one of a number of fruitful productions around the time Albee turned 80 in 2008. The first act, based on Albee’s much later “Homelife,” fleshes out Peter’s character. “A Delicate Balance” was revived a year later, starring Glenn Close.Īlbee brought back “The Zoo Story” to startling effect in 2007 with “Edward Albee’s Peter and Jerry.” The shattering encounter between two strangers in a park - the aggressive, almost psychotic Jerry and the bland, middle-age Peter - that is “The Zoo Story” became the second act of the new work. “Seascape” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” were revived on Broadway in 2005, and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was revived on Broadway again in 2013. It won five Tonys including best play, actor (Arthur Hill) and actress (Uta Hagen), and the film version won five Oscars including best actress (Taylor) and supporting actress (Sandy Dennis).Īlbee also directed the American premieres of many of his plays, starting with “Seascape” in 1975. The play focused on the interplay between reality and fantasy, a theme that persisted in many of his later works. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” presents an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-age professor and his wife verbally spar and unravel their illusions during a visit by a younger couple. With “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and 1964’s “Tiny Alice,” Albee shook up a Broadway that had been dominated by Tennessee Williams, Miller and their intellectual disciples. Written in 1958, it was first produced in Berlin, translated into German.
His father, Reed Albee, ran the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters his mother, Frances Albee, was a socialite and a commanding presence who kept a hold on him for much of his life.Įstranged from his parents, Albee moved to New York and worked as a messenger for Western Union before gaining notice with “The Zoo Story,” a one-act play about two strangers meeting on a bench in Central Park. “Each play of mine has a distinctive story to tell,” he told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2001.Īlbee was born in 1928 and was adopted by a wealthy suburban New York couple. In interviews, Albee recoiled at the idea of drawing parallels between his works or between his cynical outlook and his unhappy childhood. Many of his works had similar things in common: domestic rancor inflamed by booze, a sense of unknown anxiety, a lost child who creates a marital friction and precise but flailing language that alternates between comic and profound.
But after “Three Tall Women,” a play he called an “exorcising of demons,” he had several major productions, including “The Play About the Baby” and “The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?” which won him his second Tony for best play in 2002. Many of his productions in the years after “Seascape” were savaged by the press as inconsequential trickery, a shadow of his former works. His other Pulitzers were for “A Delicate Balance” (1967) and “Seascape” (1975). His unconventional style won him great acclaim but also led to a nearly 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition before his 1994 play, “Three Tall Women,” garnered his third Pulitzer Prize. He did it with humor and a sense of linguistic delight, using withering barbs and word play to hint at deeper meaning. “I have the same experiences that everybody else does, but… I feel the need to translate a lot of what happens to me, a lot of what I think, into a play.”Īlbee challenged audiences to question their assumptions about society and about theater itself. “It’s just a quirk of the brain that makes one a playwright,” Albee said in 2008. “If you have no wounds, how can you know you’re alive?” a character asks in Albee’s 1996 “The Play About the Baby.” In more than 30 plays, Albee skewered such mainstays of American culture as marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts. The play’s sharp-tongued humor and dark themes were the hallmarks of Albee’s style.
The Tony-winning play, still widely considered Albee’s finest, was made into an award-winning 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. ‘Virginia Woolf’ playwright Edward Albee dies at age 88 – The Denver Post Close MenuĪlbee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway in 1962.
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