[The] most brilliantly effective user of the American language in drama is Edward Albee. He has achieved as much fame in England as have Miller and Williams. In his case there might seem to be a special relationship with European drama for he has frequently been dubbed an 'absurd' dramatist. The claim of his alleged affiliation to this essentially European cult was based largely on the play The Zoo Story. On the evidence, however, of a more substantial and longer work—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—the claim seems to have an uncertain validity.

Absurdism, in so far as it relates to drama, has two main aspects—the point of view expressed in and by the play, and the method and means of expression. (p. 196)

The language of an 'absurd' play is just as distinctive as the vision which one senses or observes in it. Indeed what marks off Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett, in particular, from their nonabsurdist colleagues is the amount of attention the language they use demands (because of its uniqueness) from the playgoer and the critic. To a very high degree, the language is the focus of the vision. To try and separate meaning and speech in an absurd play is to enter far into misrepresentation or into bafflement. In absurd drama language is used poetically, in the sense that however much it may seem to be a naturalistic version of real speech, closer examination shows that it is using the resources of poetry, to a degree. (p. 197)

An absurd play is … an image of human existence. It uses the sense-data provided by the so-called everyday world … but, in the long run, the spatial boundaries of an absurd play are not to be found in 'real' life, but in an inexplicable universe and a relentless eternity.

Edward Albee, in The Zoo Story, seems to partake of some of the characteristics of absurdism. The language is apparently inconsequential at times; the relationships are unsure or inexplicable; motivations both for speech and action seem governed less by rational processes than by a meaningless spontaneous reflex, the 'meaning' is elusive and, like so many absurd plays, there is 'no beginning, no middle, no end'.

This seems a formidable collection of evidence, but it may be suggested that, qualitatively, it is spurious. Almost every item seems too mechanically arrived at, contrived by a 'clever' writer. All the figures are correct, but the answer is not the right one. There are two main reasons for placing doubt on the claim for Albee's absurdism.

The first is the absence of the characteristic absurdist vision. This is absent from all of his plays, including the chief candidate for acceptance—The Zoo Story. In that play the frenzy, the change of mood, the menace, seem to be less an attribute of character than an exercise of quixotic theatricality. Apart from this, we find ourselves eventually wondering whether this sort of episode happens often in Central Park—in other words the play is less an image than a brilliant piece of quasi-naturalistic guignol.

The second arises from the degree of 'naturalism' which is present in Albee's plays and which, finally, separates him from the absurdists. Both the degree and its extent is rooted in Albee's sensitive, almost nervy feeling for contemporary American society. He is a superb demonstrator and explicator of certain aspects of Americanism. In order to align him with Pinter we would have to say that in Pinter we find the best mirror of certain aspects of British society today—and nothing else.

It is Albee's commitment to a surgical analysis of certain aspects of American society which debars him from acceptance as a complete and pure absurd dramatist. It is easy to see why he has been associated with these dramatists, because some details of attitude which he takes up towards his society are reminiscent of the typical absurdist vision. The American Dream, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, in particular, exhibit the meaninglessness of certain habits of behaviour, speech, mores, cults, myths. Again, all three plays, to a degree, brilliantly dissect certain sterile usages of speech. The Zoo Story, especially, is redolent of Pinter's concern with human isolation and the dark wastes of non or partial communication. It might be said that Albee's apparent preoccupation with an inability to beget children (in The American Dream and Virginia Woolf) as an image of sterile futility is, in itself, an 'absurdist' point of view.

But, in all this, there is not the characteristically absurdist miasma of menace, sometimes terror, the sense of unfathomable contexts behind the immediate world of the play, the implacable atmosphere of a-morality, the curiously paradoxical use of language in a 'poetic' fashion to demonstrate, often, the futility of language itself. Indeed it is in the use of language that we can find the distance from European absurdism and the closeness to Americanism. In Albee, too, is perhaps the clearest proof, if not the deepest, that the American language is not the same thing as the English language.

He is amazingly versatile in his deployment of language forms and styles, but there are two broad areas in which he excels—they occupy … extreme positions from one another. The one may be called literary/dramatic—an eloquent, rhetorical, philosophically inclined mode, the other is demotic/dramatic—in which the usages of contemporary American speech are employed with exciting variety and effect. In The Zoo Story he uses both types, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he concentrates, though not exclusively, on the second, A Delicate Balance is almost monopolized by the first. His handling of the demotic/dramatic is much surer, and the results are decidedly more dramatically and theatrically credible than his attempts in the other mode. There, echoes of Eliot, traces even of Charles Morgan and a ghostly assembling of literary forefathers petrify the drama…. (pp. 197-99)

Albee is revealed as a dramatist of stature in his use of his 'alternative' language. He owes something to Miller in his deployment of certain characteristics of American speech but, in the long run, his is a more precise and searching mode. The most obvious affinity to Miller is in the use of repetition, but the effect is different. With Miller we feel that repetition is used in order to heighten the effect of the language—to take it one degree over naturalistic statement. With Albee we are aware that the repetitions fit more closely into the matrix of characterization; indeed they are often used, as in Virginia Woolf, self-consciously by characters with that kind of brittle, conscious verbosity apparent when the scotch-on-the-rocks set has reached the cocktail hour and its tongue is becoming loose. (p. 200)

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of absurdist writing is the extent to which dialogue—often using repetition—mirrors emptiness and futility. That emptiness separates and isolates the participants in the dialogue as certainly as a thousand miles of ocean…. The emptiness is, largely, imposed upon the participants, first and foremost by the nature of existence, but also by the particular situation and by their respective personalities. The crucial factor, however, is the first one—the strong sense of a blank force beyond control.

Albee very rarely gives this impression. The gaps and emptinesses that fall between his characters when they speak habitually convey the impression that they could be filled but, more often, they are filled almost as soon as we are aware of them—not by words, but often as efficaciously in the circumstances. Albee, unlike the absurdists, is less dominated by 'mal d'existence' than beguiled by 'mal de psychologie'. His silences and gaps are filled very quickly by material which comes straight out of the personality of the participants, goaded by the situation or event. (pp. 200-01)

Albee's métier as a dramatist of society and man's self-created tensions within it, and his versatility with words are shown, too, in his remarkable manipulation of the language of situation. Again, he uses repetition, but with a very much greater sense of using a technique; at times he reminds one of the Restoration penchant for drawing attention to the very fabric of language and to the cleverness with which it is spun. Virginia Woolf, again, provides the best evidence. (p. 202)

Albee, generally, seems to be very much more deliberately conscious of the technicalities of using words and takes more delight in employing them for dramatic and theatrical effect than other twentieth-century American dramatists. He seems to have a fastidiousness in his make-up which impels him to look at and to listen to the way his countrymen speak with a rare attention to detail….

In his deployment of American speech Albee, especially in The Zoo Story and Virginia Woolf, shows that same compulsion towards the rhetorical [noticeable] … in Miller and Williams and which seems to be a characteristically American predisposition. Albee seems more aware than his colleagues of its dangers—of sentimentality and sententiousness—and he attempts to disguise these in different ways. In A Delicate Balance where he uses a sophisticated language which has the flavour of the more cerebral long speeches in A Family Reunion, he tries to moderate the effects by the occasional use of an idiomatic phrase. (p. 203)

Albee, like Miller and Williams, is at his best when he is not attempting to create a 'literary' language. The American penchant for over-dramatization, over-explicit statement, sentimentality of expression, overcomes them all when they try to invent a poetry of language. All three, but particularly Albee, succeed when they exploit the resources of American spoken speech, not when they try to make one up. This can be put in another way. When American dramatists, either consciously or unconsciously, try to achieve an English classicism they fail. When they write out of the dialect or dialects of their own American tribe, they succeed. (p. 204)