[In the excerpt below, Simard explores Albee's technique of undercutting "conventional expectations by dividing his emphasis between external and internal reality. " The critic further argues that Albee's "realistic framework, the family, serves as the point of departure for his own type of subjective reality, an examination of his characters ' psyches."]

Albee was early heralded in America as the brilliant young playwright and the inheritor and savior of the native dramatic tradition. Like Pinter in Britain, Albee was the first American dramatist to look beyond national boundaries and offer an infusion of Continental experimentalism to a drama that was dominated by the social realism of Miller and the psychological realism of Williams, although neither of these playwrights had produced a major work for some time. And also like Pinter, Albee looked to the European absurdists for his methods, which he turned to an examination of particularly American concerns, recognizing the limits of absurdism but also the value in its expansion of dramatic possibility.

Tom F. Driver observes that "the story of American theater is that of an attempt, not entirely successful, to create an indigenous art for a mass audience that is highly materialistic and is experiencing an astonishingly rapid growth in material power and technical knowledge," adding that the American sensibility has little awareness of man's being born to catastrophe, and that interiority in drama has traditionally been expressed in therapeutic, neo-Freudian terms, seldom, if ever, in terms of Chekhovian tragicomedy. 1 American drama had indeed made significant advances since O'Neill, and in a relatively short period, but one must not fail to note the parallel development with Britain, which had also been fairly static in terms of development since the burst of originality in Shaw. American drama dates from O'Neill, for both America and Britain share the same dramatic heritage before his emergence. Perhaps the lack of a distinctly native tradition in contrast to the British tradition, which stretches back beyond Shakespeare, is the reason why many modern dramatic critics have so frequently deplored the condition of native drama, but by the late 1950s, everyone was willing to herald the emergence of originality. Unlike Pinter, who emerged during the burst of activity of New Wave drama, Albee was alone in his attempts and seemed to be the figure America had been awaiting to revitalize moribund Broadway.

Catapulted into fame and immediately subjected to rigorous scrutiny, Albee has always been simultaneously lauded and reviled, and he continues to suffer from extremes in evaluations of his works. While in the early 1960s, the usually astute Driver could dismiss Albee as "the author of six bad plays," 2 Tennessee Williams could also say that he "is the only great playwright we've had in America." 3 The inheritor of a realistic Anglo-American tradition, Albee rejected that tradition and looked to Europe, especially to Ionesco and Beckett, and became the first American postmodern dramatist, like Pinter inspiring a new generation of writers whose experimentation has largely escaped the attacks Albee experienced while working in seeming isolation. Rejecting "our one-dimensional dramatic tradition, his search for a new dramatic language is part of a deep-rooted instinct to find adequate expression for the existential dilemma at the heart of the modern experience," asserts Anne Paolucci. 4

In 1962, while observing that the Theater of the Absurd is either on its way out or undergoing a fundamental change, Albee was able to "submit that The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that is is truly the contemporary theater, facing as it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theater of our time.…"' And Paolucci notes that,

The theater of the absurd has struggled to find ways of redefining these essentials, Juxtaposing internal landscape and external events, facts and fantasy, reshaping language to suit the splintered action, using everything that the stage offers to do so. But the kind of protagonist that emerges within this new medium is forever threatening to dissolve into a voice, a mind, a consciousness, a strange creature without identity or personality.⁶

Albee, like Pinter, avoids the traps of enclosure and reduction to essence evident in Beckett's work, attempting like the Englishman to achieve a plurality of vision and to avoid creating existential artifacts. Paralleling the course of Pinter's experimentalism, Albee's work continues to explore the means to expand the limits of dramatic reality with each new play, building on the concepts and methods asserted in each succeeding work. Much like Pinter's, his technique is to undercut conventional expectations by dividing his emphasis between external and internal reality. He terms his method "selective reality," 7 which is a combination of the concept of plastic theater as evidenced in Williams' The Glass Menagerie, a memory play which breaks down the time continuum and portrays a subjective, impressionistic reality, and the metaphorical allusiveness of the Beckett canon. His characters and situations are both specific and general, functioning on one level of reality within the context of the drama as well as suggesting multi-leveled layers of universal significance. His national inheritance is evident in his specific social criticism, an established American convention since the 1920s, and while he criticizes institutions, they are not necessarily specifically American, although they tend to be more specific than the menace, or threat to individuality, evident in Pinter's work.

Often using the family as a microcosm of society, he examines the nature of human bonds in a situation where the present is contingent on both past and future. His realistic framework, the family, serves as the point of departure for his own type of subjective reality, an examination of his characters' psyches, dramatized in as late a play as All Over/ Albee's method, as a brief overview of his canon will suggest, is to uncover and reveal the unconscious of his characters, making internal reality his mode and the interplay of personalities and values his dramatic action. His producer, Richard Barr, has noted that "Edward was the first playwright to say that people invent their own illusions to give themselves a reality. And his characters are aware of it. … The awareness was what was new." 8

Albee's subject matter is the conventional system of false values, empty language, and sterile emotion that are the means by which modern individuals, not simply Americans, "illusion" themselves from reality. External reality is not the true reality of modern existence but lies beneath the surface in the individual mind, riddled with its own subjective set of illusions and anxieties. His work is social criticism only insofar as modern individuals are social creatures. He examines people not in the isolation of the room/womb as Pinter does, but in their familial environment, which Albee sees as a cage which separates them from all other people who inhabit their own individual cages. He attacks language as a masking illusion, composed of clichéd conventions which obscure meaning rather than conveying it. In his early plays particularly, such as The American Dream and The Sandbox, where the influence of Ionesco is strongest, the trite speeches of his characters demonstrate their lack of feeling and their inhumanity, the danger and horror of the ordinary, as they avoid communication with those people seemingly closest to them, an effect underscored by their familial situation.

All of Albee's characters experience a glimpse into the void of meaninglessness, but only those who surrender to it become the human wreckage many critics find to be the hallmark of his drama. Even one of the bleakest of his plays, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? offers the possibility of redemption at the end. If George and Martha, like all his characters, can confront the reality of the emptiness of their lives and throw off their insulating illusion, such as their personal myth of the nonexistent child, then they may have the hope of constructing a subjective validity of existence. Only when stripped of illusion can humanity hope for redemption and salvation, an elevation invariably offered in terms of establishing meaning and assigning value to another person in an honest and aware relationship. While Pinter dramatizes choice on a metaphoric level, examining characters as they construct a method for dealing with life, Albee suggests that self-value is ultimately reflected in one's relationships with others. One must discard lies and evaluate self for what it is, then subjectively construct a set of values that recognize that, while essentially isolated, people give meaning to themselves only by choosing to value other people and by finding strength in others in order to confront the void. While Albee does not deny that the existential reality of life is isolation and a subjective perception of reality, he goes one step further than Pinter by suggesting that people must be social creatures and must establish realistic means for dealing with others. Love and commitment are his chief weapons against meaninglessness.

Like Pinter, Albee's range of experimentation is wide and he continues to produce works that further develop certain basic premises. His first play, The Zoo Story (1959), examines the isolation of modern life and argues for the need and difficulty of meaningful, as opposed to empty, human communication. Humans are no better than animals if they refuse to recognize the presence of their cage and then break out of it and touch another human being. Realistically grounded, the play uses standard absurdist techniques to heighten reality and to suggest its internal quality, for while it hinges dramatically on the murder/suicide of Jerry, the resolution is in Peter's psyche, as he, like the reader, struggles to make sense of what he has experienced. The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) is more clearly rooted in external reality and explores the social cages created by gender, race, profession, and psychology, pointing out the disparity between things as they are and things as they should be.

Following this venture into psychological realism, he produced The Sandbox(1960) and The American Dream (1961), two absurdist plays that are variations on a theme and are paradigmatic of the early Albee. Evidencing the strong influence of both Ionesco and Beckett, these episodic works are constructed of linking situations and employ conventional, cliche-ridden language. While the three generations of family members function allegorically to point out the emptiness of modern life as well as to direct several important social attacks, their primary function is to underscore the isolation and lack of communication in relationships externally structured on love but internally founded on lies and sterility. Time past (Grandma) is discarded by the mechanized and inhuman present (the solipsistic Mommy and emasculated Daddy), whose heir is the empty and materialistic young man (the American Dream), the personification of anesthetized external beauty who will do anything for money. He is the future of the modern individual who refuses to place value on internal qualities.

These allegorized metaphors of modern humanity give way to the more realistic and specific characters of his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). A dramatization of the empty ritual by which people insulate themselves from an awareness of themselves, the play exposes the internal horror beneath the surface of ordinary social interaction as the characters flail about in the void of meaninglessness without attempting to face the reality of their lives and construct a sense of subjective worth and direction. Enclosed in their room, George and Martha savage each other in an attempt to externalize the blame for the emptiness of their lives, which are based on multiple illusions, such as the imaginary child and George's ascension to the presidency of the college. Only at the end of the play when they have brutally stripped each other of these illusions does the possibility exist of facing reality. At the close of Act III, "The Exorcism," Martha admits her fear of Virginia Woolf, the fear of madness in denying reality, as she and George retire to rest for the new day, literally and metaphorically the new beginning of their lives together. While quite specifically about two people in a specific situation, wielding words as weapons to cloak reality, the play is also open to metaphoric interpretations reminiscent of Beckett's work. The roots of American idealism are suggested by their names, the disparity between public existence (Nick and Honey) and private reality (George and Martha) is contrasted, and one can read the play as a conflict between failed history (George) and the new methods of science (Nick). Thus, this play, as is characteristic of all of Albee's plays, functions in a specific way, exploring the layers of subjective reality, as well as in a general way, providing metaphors for many of the conflicts of modern existence.

Albee's next effort was at sustained religious allegory, Tiny Alice (1964), and is a not altogether successful attempt at presenting subjective, existential reality in symbolic terms. His restrained A Delicate Balance (1966) is perhaps Albee's finest exploration of existential terror in its attempts to probe his basic philosophic preoccupations within a realistic framework. Like Beckett and Pinter, he takes this idea to further dramatic extremes in his brace of experimental works, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1968). These theatrical attempts at allegorical minimalism are lyrical intertwinings of interior monologues which attempt to present objective and subjective reality simultaneously.

However, Albee returned to his more characteristic realistic mode with his next works, All Over (1971) and Seascape (1975), which were originally planned as companion pieces under the collective title of Life and Death. The former is a modern morality play, at once naturalistic and symbolic, which eschews exposition and explores the veiling nature of memory and the subjectivity of time. Clearly Pinteresque in technique, it remains characteristic of Albee in its final insistence on human values and the abandonment of illusion for personal salvation. The latter play defies external reality by presenting two lizards as human prototypes in its attempt to dramatize a collapse of time, confronting modern humanity with what it once was. By suggesting that individuals must assume a stance of negative capability and confront the unknowns of life boldly, Albee once again affirms the power of emotion in the renewed, realistic bond between Charlie and Nancy, his existential everymen.

The following year, Albee again returned to Beckettian (and Pinteresque) experimentation with Listening, an exploration of the subjectivity of perception. His allegorized—yet specific—Man and Woman are portraits in isolation and the inability to communicate as they drift in the haze of memory, detached from time, exploring the impossibility of verification of self. Counting the Ways (1977) continues this exploration into minimalism and subjectivity, as He and She maintain their own delicate balance, threatened with non-existence. Affirming love at the conclusion, it charts the impossibility of knowing or communicating anything, especially redemptive emotion. Reality for these characters is completely subjective as they attempt to break through their cages of isolation; they realize the impossibility of empirical knowledge yet the necessity of affirmation as She responds to his "Do you love me?" with "I think I do.'" Albee's recent play, The Lady from Dubuque (1979), is a return to the realistic mode. It presents a social group of characters who are nonetheless isolated from each other despite the elaborate network of connections they have imposed on their lives. Personified psychological states, they represent individual reactions to nothingness. Again, he underscores the subjectivity of reality by insisting that no matter what social bonds we construct to illusion ourselves, we are essentially alone. Contemporary people can find sustenance in love and the courage to face the unknown, but their reactions and values are intensely personal.

John von Szeliski states that "in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance we have the most significant representation of the essence, and the effective treatment, of a world view of the 1960s or the 1970s."¹⁰ Awarded a Pulitzer Prize (which many people maintain was a consolation for losing it with Who's Afraid), this play is perhaps the best example of the polarity in Albee criticism, but many of the attacks on the play may be surprise reactions to the uncharacteristic understatement of the work. It is an examination of free-floating anxiety, the "Terror," to which all human beings are susceptible, manifested here as a failure of love and a fear of isolation. The balance of the title is the delicate line which separates reality from illusion, which the typical Albee couple, Agnes and Tobias, try to walk. In Pinteresque fashion, they inhabit their room, insulated from reality, and face threats from all sides; they are poised between extremes in their own family, for Claire represents escape in self-withdrawal and Julia is escape in flight. Faced with varieties of isolation, from cynicism to romance within their own family structure, they have to confront the Terror brought into their home by intruders, their best friends, Edna and Harry.

The power of the drama arises from its shift from the external to the internal, from objective to subjective reality, and the conclusion is much like that of Who's Afraid: battle weary, scarred, and exhausted, Agnes and Tobias, like George and Martha, have undergone an ordeal and are indeed drained, but they lack the cushioning illusion they held at the beginning of the play which separated them from self-awareness and from each other. Agnes' closing line, "Come now; we can begin the day" (170), holds the promise of a new beginning, a brutal facing of reality highly reminis-cent of the sunrise in Ibsen's Ghosts. While apparently less than they once were, the characters have achieved a new potentiality simply by losing what they once had: the illusions that made them withdraw into the room in isolation from each other and the world. Having glimpsed the void, their fear is generalized as a fear of meaninglessness or nothingness, but it has specific applications as well. Their lives are obviously not what they had been trying to believe they were, for the concept of family and the ritual of communication are empty, merely gestures to maintain the illusion of emotion and meaning where none actually exist. So not only do they fear an abstract philosophical concept, they fear the emptiness and isolation of their collective and individual lives as well.

As in Pinter's work, the menace in this play is an abstraction, but Albee goes further by giving it very specific applications as well. While the nature of action in Pinter is relatively unimportant, since he stresses the importance of the decision process itself, Albee maintains that action is vital while suggesting the nature of the action: people must strip themselves of illusion, bond themselves to one another, and emerge from their rooms to face the daylight of shared reality. Subjective reality is every individual's terrain and the realm of personal consciousness, but it is isolating. Fragmented subjective realities must be bound together to form a collective, for people cannot retreat from the society of which they are a part, even if the unit is as small as a marriage or a family. Like Pinter, studying the response to external demands, Albee presents the fear by fiat; nothingness is an existential reality. His concern is with how his characters deal with abstractions, with the choices they make. Action in the face of contingency is the primary post-modern dramatic subject.

As in Beckett and Pinter, Albee's plays generally begin in recognizable, external reality and shift to specific explorations of inner realities within the characters. His method of selective reality within a traditional framework allows him to expand the limits of conventional realism by dramatizing characters in the process of self-exploration, stripping away the layers of illusion to reach the emptiness of their lives, the naked masks of Pirandello. But Albee is not content with a dramatization of choice and his characters are not stale-mated abstractions, such as Reader in Ohio Impromptu or even Disson in Tea Party. They are recognizable, individualized characters who reach their lower depths and stand stripped of false notions of self, attaining a universality by their nakedness. Albee's drama is a celebration of the possibility of ascent, of the possibility of redefining self and emerging from isolation to make contact with others. His optimism lies in his belief in redemptive emotion, a positive valuation of one's self and one's fellow human beings. Albee may be cynical about the difficulty involved in the struggle for self-awareness, but his drama concludes with possibility. The thunder in the drama holds a tentative promise of rain in the existential wasteland of postmodern existence.

In summary, both Pinter and Albee represent a distinct break with the Beckettian tradition, itself a fusion of realism and experimentalism. Their plays stand at the crossroads of twentieth-century drama, and various attempts have been made to place them technically and historically, the most important theories being dissonance, compressionism, and contextualism. While each of these views has its merits, both playwrights must be viewed as unique transition figures, the first of the postmoderns, for whom no specific categories are immediately applicable.

In the Beckettian tradition of minimalism and the movement toward essence, some plays by Pinter and Albee, such as Landscape and Box, have been viewed by Robert May-berry as comprising a theater of dissonance or discord, "the disassociation of the visual and the verbal media"; similar in form to the interplay between objective and subjective reality which characterizes all these plays, this particular theory asserts that "Beckett relocated the central conflict traditionally found in a struggle between characters to the more abstract level of conflicting media," placing the dramatic actions of the plays within the minds of the readers.11 Both Pinter and Albee have returned to conventional forms that adhere to a basic realistic tradition after their experiments in theatricality, yet they preserve the effect of dissonance. Within a recognizable mode of external reality, their plays probe the consciousnesses of individual characters, exposing at once the social framework of their lives as well as their interiority. The juxtaposition of the specific and the general, the subjective and the objective, the particular and the universal, the interior and the exterior, the imagistic and the metaphoric, creates both the plurality of form and response, defying probability for possibility to engage readers to the limits of their own awareness. These dramas expand from the specificity of the text to the consciousness of the characters to the perception of the reader. Meaning in these plays spirals inward to the point where it is given substance only in response to the dramatic action. Readers are at once alienated from a form which seems familiar on the surface but thwarts their expectations while they are actively engaged in the resolution of the action and the assignment of value. The subjectivity of reality, therefore, embraces reader/audience perception, and the postmodern form is one which simultaneously alienates and engages.

Noting that absurdism denies the "weapons" of traditional drama, Laurence Kitchin observes that the mode "attacks us below the threshold of consciousness, mainly by visual devices and by language in a state of fragmentation, in short, by a kind of intellectual clowning." Dismissing absurdism as a fruitless experiment in form, Kitchin goes on to maintain that the two basic forms of postmodern drama are the epic and compressionism, the latter being plays "in which the characters are insulated from society in such a way as to encourage the maximum conflict of attitudes." 12 While such a term aptly describes the works of Pinter and Albee, it tends to suggest the theatricalism of the late Beckett canon more than the existential realism of the postmoderns. Maintaining that realism, not theatricalism, is the essential mode of modern drama, John Gassner argues for a contextual view of drama that results in the "coexistence of realism and non-realistic stylization turned into an active and secure partnership in the interests of essential realism." He observes that,

In one way or another, modern drama has again and again manifested an instinct for organization, as against disorganization; a feeling for crescendo, as against decrescendo, stasis, and circularity; a regard for language, as against a disregard for it in favor of silent mimesis or mime; and, in general, a marked esthetic orientation, as against a sense of disintegration and chaos.¹³

The tension between these impulses is precisely the difference in direction between Beckett and his successors, Pinter and Albee. They reject his dissolution into essence and insist on a dramatic portrayal of existence, and their works are contextual in a similar sense to which the term was originally applied to poetry, relying on tensions of context rather than direction, probing and displaying vertical depth rather than horizontal movement.

As Marvin Rosenberg observes, the modern impulse is to hold time at bay, to circumscribe the present and to isolate a non-narrative felt life. He points out that this impulse can follow two paths, toward the "pure," a theatrical embodiment of a mental state, where the character becomes a trans-parent image rather than an intermediate symbol (as in Godot), or becomes a condition of living (as in the late Beckett); or it can follow traditional development, wherein character is extended in dimension (as in Death of a Salesman). As Rosenberg maintains, contextual drama seeks to represent the psyche which rebels against pattern,14 but as Bert O. States points out, Rosenberg's concept of contextual form is actually a description of effect. He maintains that the plays of the "New drama" "do not imitate actions, they imitate the mind; or, in clearer terms, these plays do not have plots, they have psychology."¹⁵ The positions of both scholars are extremes, for postmodern drama, as established by Pinter and Albee, seeks to dramatize consciousness detached from time, and the action or plot is the interplay of individually apprehended consciousnesses and subjective evaluations of reality. Reality is what the individual character (and reader) apprehends it to be, and the dramatic action is often the disparity between one view and another or between perceived and external reality. What appears to be a realistic drama staged in terms of external reality is found to be actually unfolding on the level of the subconscious, and it is on this level that it has its effect on the reader. The external framework acts as a touchstone to measure the depth of the playwright's probing into subjective perception. By the continual interplay between external and internal reality, readers are able to chart the depth and progress of their own involvement in the play. The readers' positions and responsibilities are to integrate the two (or more) levels of reality and draw their own subjective conclusions. Thus, in the most Brechtian manner are the readers involved in the work, and they must apprehend the totality of the dramatic experience to interpret it, for the form is decidedly not discursive in the traditional sense. Even the language is unreliable, for text often serves only to point to a more important subtext, which underscores the essential literary condition of postmodern drama, for form and content are in-separable, and while performance adds another dimension to the individual play, direct interpretation of the text alone discloses the theatrical and dramatic intentions of the playwright.

Pinter and Albee effectively point the direction for the unification of the late modern interior view of the human condition with traditional realism in an effective, integrated form. Their adaptation of experimental techniques, especially those advocated by Beckett and the other absurdists, to conventional form has allowed an expansion of possibility for the exploration of a paradoxically reduced postmodern concern, the existential reality of human existence. The individual applications of these concepts by a new generation of dramatists signal the establishment of a distinctly postmodern dramatic literary aesthetic.

Notes

¹Romantic Quest and Modern Query (New York: Delacorte, 1970), pp. 285,321-22.

²"What's the Matter with Edward Albee?" in The Modern American Theater, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 99.

³Quoted in Richard E. Amacher, Edward Albee (New York: Twayne, 1969), p. 170.

⁴From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbonéale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 10,5.

⁵Quoted in John Gassner, Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 334.

⁶Paolucci, p. 10.

⁷Quoted in Amacher, p. 34.

⁸Quoted in David Richards, "Edward Albee: Who's Afraid of the Critics?" Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), 18 Feb. 1982, Sec. C, p. 8.

⁹Edward Albee, Counting the Ways, in The Plays (New York: Atheneum, 1982), III, 51; subsequent references to the various plays in this four volume edition will appear as page numbers in parentheses in the text.

¹⁰Tragedy and Fear (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 23.

¹¹"A Theatre of Discord: Some Plays of Beckett, Albee, and Pinter," Kansas Quarterly, 12 (1980), 7.

¹²Drama in the Sixties (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 30, 21, 46; see also

¹³Gassner, pp. 354,358; italics in the original.

¹⁴"A Metaphor for Dramatic Form," in Gassner, pp. 342-50.

¹⁵"The Case for Plot in Modern Drama," Hudson Review, 20 (Spring 1967), 52-53.