Edward Albee

Introduction

Edward Albee

“What a dump!” Edward Albee’s reputation in many ways began with those words. The phrase is featured in the opening scene of his groundbreaking work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The 1962 play shocked audiences with its salty language and frank depiction of a drunken couple mired in a bitter middle-aged malaise. Highly influenced by the absurdist work of playwrights like Samuel Becket, Albee would later craft plays that were increasingly antirealistic. His hallmark as a writer has been the way he balances the realistic and the absurd, packaging big ideas in sharp, often biting dialogue. Albee’s writing is frequently heralded for its intellectuality, and Albee himself has worked as a lecturer and educator, inspiring future generations of dramatists to find their own unique theatrical voices. 

Essential Facts

1. One of Albee’s best-loved (and harrowing) short plays, The Zoo Story, was reworked by the author more than four decades later into the full-length piece Peter and Jerry.
2. Fractured family dynamics figure prominently in many of Albee’s plays. That has led some critics to suggest that Albee’s tense relationship with his adopted parents was instrumental in shaping him into the writer he would become.
3. Albee’s play Seascape features a decidedly Daniel-Pinkwater-ian conceit: two of the main characters are giant lizards.
4. Albee’s 2002 Tony Award-winning play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? deals with a most unusual subject: the disintegration of an upper middle-class family upon the revelation that the father has been carrying on an emotion and sexual affair with the titular goat.
5. Albee has received the Pulitzer Prize three times, for A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women. Tellingly, he did not win it for his most famous and respected work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?