Edward Albee 1928-

An acclaimed and controversial playwright, Albee is best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his first full-length drama. Although initially characterized either as a realist or an absurdist, Albee combines elements from the American tradition of social criticism—established by such playwrights as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill—with aspects of the Theater of the Absurd, as practiced by Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. While Albee's plays often portray alienated individuals who suffer as a result of unjust social, moral, and religious strictures, his works usually offer solutions to conflicts rather than conveying an absurdist sense of inescapable determinism. As Matthew C. Roudané has declared, "Albee's is an affirmative vision of human experience. His vision underscores the importance of confronting one's inner and outer world of O'Neillean 'pipe-dreams,' or illusions. In the midst of a dehumanizing society, Albee's heroes, perhaps irrationally, affirm living." In a career spanning more than thirty years, Albee has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times: for A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Albee is the adopted child of Reed and Frances Albee, heirs to the multi-million dollar fortune of American theater manager Edward Franklin Albee I. He began attending the theater and writing poetry at the age of six, wrote a three-act sex farce when he was twelve, and attempted two novels while a teenager. Many critics suggest that the tense family conflicts characteristic of Albee's dramas are derived from his childhood experiences. After attending several private and military schools and enrolling briefly at Trinity College in Connecticut, Albee achieved limited success as an author of poetry and fiction before turning to drama. Although he remained associated with off-Broadway theater until the production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he first garnered critical and popular acclaim for his one-act dramas, which prompted comparisons to the works of Williams and Ionesco. In addition to the three Pulitzer prizes, Albee has received several other prestigious honors, including the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his dramatic works.

MAJOR WORKS

Albee immediately established himself as a promising young playwright with his first mature play, The Zoo Story, which received its American debut on a double bill with a play by Samuel Beckett and which was favorably compared with the elder playwright's work. Albee continued to build his reputation as an innovator in the absurdist manner with such one-act plays as The Sandbox and The American Dream. Mainstream success came with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, produced on Broadway in 1961. This drama won a number of awards but, in a controversial decision, was denied the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a film with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1966.

Albee continued to experiment with a variety of forms, subjects, and styles in his succeeding plays; and while several of them failed commercially and elicited scathing reviews for their abstract classicism and dialogue, many scholars have commended his commitment to theatrical experimentation and refusal to pander to commercial pressures. The unorthodox Tiny Alice, Albee's follow-up to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was considered by some critics to be incomprehensible for the manner in which it deviates from realism with respect to setting, characterization, and internal time. Nevertheless, it has, in the years since its first performance, sparked a great deal of critical interest and commentary. While, for its part, A Delicate Balance was widely faulted for lacking action and cohesive ideas, it nevertheless garnered approval for its synthesis of dramatic elements and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Similarly, Albee's second Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Seascape, was regarded by some as pretentious but was commended overall for its lyrical quality and insights into the human condition. After several critical and financial disappointments in the 1980s, including The Lady from Dubuque (which closed after only twelve performances) and The Man Who Had Three Arms, Albee returned in 1991 with Three Tall Women, for which he received his third Pulitzer. His most recent work is The Play about the Baby, which was produced in 1998.