EDWARD ALBEE

With a kind of perverse pride, the 1970 paperback edition of Tiny Alice trumpets quotes from those who denounce the author as well as those who hail him as "the most distinguished playwright in the history of American theatre." For book jacket copy, this is a rare instance of truth-in-advertising. I have never met anyone who has only one feeling about Edward Albee.

To interview Albee, as I recently did, is to encounter an icon of American culture, and preparing for the experience turns out to be a little bit like approaching the Wizard of Oz. The person you meet at the end can't help being dwarfed by the reputation that precedes him in the form of controversy and celebration, Pulitzer Prizes and bad reviews. Along that brick road paved with yellowed clippings and golden rules, I spoke to various people inside and outside the theater world to gauge the temperature of their interest in the subject and test the tenor of their perceptions. I found virtually unanimous admiration for The Zoo Story, the taut two-hander that introduced the playwright to Off-Broadway in 1960, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that tsunami of marital discord which was first produced 30 years ago on Broadway when Albee was 32 and practically overnight established a permanent place for him in the pantheon of American letters. Different degrees of enthusiasm were expressed for The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith, early one-acts of Zoo Story vintage, and Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance, the two major plays that immediately followed Virginia Woolf, as well as some residual fondness for Albee's stage adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel Ballad of a Sad Cafe and the eccentric evening of theater known as Box-Mao-Box, which briefly ran on Broadway in 1968. Beyond that landmark, I found an array of sentiments regarding what can only be called The Problem of Edward Albee -- the stretch of his career that extends from, say, 1971 when All Over premiered on Broadway to, well, pretty much this minute.

In academia, for instance, a range of opinions prevail. One theater professor in Washington sees Albee as a transitional figure, the American equivalent of Jean Anouilh -- that is, someone whose work has historical value in that it combines the ideas of post-war existentialism with the techniques of boulevard drama. And she praises the work Albee has done as a mentor (his Edward Albee Foundation maintains an artists' colony on the grounds of his Long Island home in Montauk) before mentioning that in her modern drama survey course he has been dropped from the curriculum. A University of California professor considers Albee "safely categorized as a writer way past his important time," his language "encrusted in layers of scar tissue." On the other hand, a drama instructor in Texas who has directed several of Albee's plays delivers a passionate and persuasive defense of Seascape, a philosophical drama featuring two humans and two lizards which won the Pulitzer in 1975 but has rarely been produced since: "It's a funny, truthful play about bigotry and making peace with the Other. How do you relate to someone who doesn't understand your fundamental premise?" While intensely admiring Tiny Alice as "a parable about the nature of God and worship," the same university professor admits that in production he "cut the hell out of the final speech, which makes the play mystifying in a way it needn't be."

Playwrights cite Albee's generosity as a colleague (his defense, for instance, of younger writers as a member of the council of the Dramatists' Guild) as well as his pomposity. One writer confides that he finds Albee's plays "dry as dust," while another finds it "outrageous" that Albee, like Arthur Miller, should have to look to European theaters to produce his new plays. Meanwhile, the press has its own evolving fascination with Albee. In the early years of his career, every detail of his comings and goings, his public statements and the furnishings of his home were reported in the papers with the slavish attention only accorded to genuine superstars. Over time, a sour and at times savage relationship has developed between Albee and the press. The sickening influence on American society of the media's fixation on celebrities was the subject of Albee's 1983 play The Man Who Had Three Arms, which was somewhat overzealously attacked by critics who defensively ignored the play's truths and concentrated on its considerable disingenuousness. Few successful playwrights in recent memory have fallen so far from critical favor. Reviewing the 1981 Broadway adaptation of Lolita that Albee himself later called "the one really truly ugly theater experience I have had," Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times, "This playwright, who promised and delivered great things two decades ago, has in recent years abandoned his gifts. Now he's...forsaken the humane impulse that is the minimal, rock-bottom essential of art." More than one article has suggested that Albee abandon playwriting and take up another career.

Almost universally, though, even among his detractors, mixed feelings about Albee rule the day. Respect mixes with pity, scorn merges with compassion, and dismissive attitudes yield the last word to curiosity: what is he up to now?

That question took me to Houston, where Albee spends four months each spring teaching at the University of Houston and working at the Alley Theatre. As associate artist at the Alley, he has directed one show a year, beginning in 1990 with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and continuing with Albee Directs Beckett, a double-bill of Ohio Impromptu and Krapp's Last Tape. Teaching and directing have become significant secondary careers for the 64-year-old playwright; after staging the Broadway revival of Virginia Woolf with Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara in 1976, he mounted a program of his one-act plays which toured a number of American universities under the title Albee Directs Albee, and in 1989 he directed Virginia Woolf in Los Angeles with Glenda Jackson and John Lithgow. This year brings an unusual amount of new play activity on Albee's part. In January he's directing the U.S. premiere of Marriage Play, a 1987 drama first seen at the English Theater in Vienna in which Albee returns to Virginia Woolf territory, stripping the situation back to its Beckettian essence: a long-married couple rehearse for a separation that never quite takes place. After opening at the Alley, the production, which features Shirley Knight and Tom Klunis, travels to the McCarter Theater in Princeton. Meanwhile, in April his new play about Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca will have its world premiere at the University of Houston as the inaugural event of the Houston International Festival. You might think that Albee's busy schedule of teaching, directing, and writing would keep him out of trouble, but no: one of four keynote speakers at the OutWrite '91 conference for gay and lesbian writers last spring in San Francisco, Albee was roundly booed for his contention that gay writers should aspire to the mainstream and avoid ghettoizing themselves.

Controversy and conflict don't trouble Albee. If anything, he seems to enjoy it, as I discovered when we met. Someone who has been interviewed as much as Albee has is a difficult subject; he's heard the same questions so many times that he has developed carefully sculpted standard responses which he reels off like so many tape loops on cue. Unless you want to get exactly the same interview he's given 150 times before, you have to be vigilant about spotting set speeches and punching the "eject" button. The process of doing that brought out, I confess, a rather bratty and contentious side of my journalistic personality. If Albee noticed, he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he seemed to feel more at home being challenged than being agreed with. In that sense, he lived up to the impression you might get from his plays. In person he's tense, guarded, spiky; you could not call him friendly. Like many men, he's emotionally stiff and has trouble admitting to fears, doubts, vulnerability. And he speaks in a muffled, rather distant voice, as if it's coming from deep inside the carapace of The Great Man.

The meeting was not without its surprises. One doesn't necessarily imagine Edward Albee as an animal lover, but apparently he's always surrounded by them; a very affectionate stray tabby named Biscuit bounced from lap to lap as we talked. The walls of the apartment Albee rents in a Houston high-rise were covered with large invasive paintings by local art students, the visual art equivalent of stray cats. (An active collector, he maintains art warehouses near the homes in Texas, New York, and Florida he shares with sculptor Jonathan Thomas, his mate of 20 years.) Out of the blue he mentioned his desire to try sky-diving. And pondering the mystery of his birth parents -- he was adopted as an infant by a wealthy couple (his grandfather, E.F. Albee, founded the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit) -- he became almost wistful. In contrast to the tirades on the miserable state of Broadway and the critics and the theater owners that Albee seems to feel obliged to deliver when provided a public forum, these quirky moments provided a fascinating opportunity to watch him relax his mask. In those moments, I glimpsed the arduous effort it takes to defend an embattled literary legend and to live your life as a working writer at the same time.

We met on a hazy, warm Saturday morning in the midst of previews and last-minute rehearsals of Marriage Play.

I don't go for any particular beat necessarily. It's what the play wants to be about. If we were an ideal society, I suppose there'd be nothing to complain about.

But the function of art is to instruct us. To bring order. To make us think clearly. If we want our arts to be escapist, if we want them to conform to our opinions of ourselves, what earthly good are they? I mean, no serious art that's come down through the centuries has been anything but critical and unpleasant ultimately.

Ask anybody which are Shakespeare's major plays. They're going to say King Lear first, if they have any sense. They're going to say The Tempest and maybe Hamlet. Those are the three really major ones. And they are corrective and instructive and certainly not escapist. I don't think he ever wrote an escapist play. A play can be funny and serious at the same time. Certainly Aristophanes was funny. Moliere was funny. Certainly social critics like Shaw and Wilde are funny. Chekhov is funny. Beckett is funny. I don't think it needs to be humorless. But I don't think there's any point in experiencing anything in the arts that leaves you exactly where you were when you started.

I use preview audiences the way everyone uses preview audiences except I don't do it for 57 performances the way they do it on Broadway -- we have six: to test whether or not theory is working out against practice, to judge the interrelationship between the audience and the play. Not that I ever compromise a play to make an audience happy. But if I've done something I feel a rational audience is not able to follow, or is bored by, it means maybe I'm being a little self-indulgent.

Oh, maybe the author fighting with the director. The author wanting to keep in some lovely writing that doesn't accomplish much of anything except being lovely writing. The director wanting to take it out. I always win.

Yes. My most recent play, Three Tall Women, was done there this summer.

No, they weren't.

They were called Gillian and Jack there.

I just hadn't given them names yet. Since they never call each other by name, why waste names? But then if you don't give them names, people say, "Ah, they're symbolic." So you have to waste names on them.

No, their names are Gillian and Jack.

I suppose it might, maybe, if somebody thought about it, except the characters in the script are Gillian and Jack, not Jack and Jill. A lot of people wouldn't catch that. Local joke. I amuse myself sometimes. In my play Finding the Sun, the characters are called Abigail, Benjamin, Cordelia, Daniel -- it's alphabetical.

I didn't know that. Hmm.

Well, yes, Beckett's plays are inhabited by real people, not symbolic people. So are mine. Anybody is making a mistake if they think Beckett is writing about ideas rather than individuals. He's writing about ideas, too, but his characters are three-dimensional. I just finished directing two of his plays here at the Alley last year, Ohio Impromptu and Krapp's Last Tape. Fully three-dimensional. But bringing things down to essences, which is what Beckett was all about, is something we all ought to practice a little bit more.

No more or less than any of the others. He's one of the major influences on me, along with Chekhov and Pirandello, I suppose.

Everybody does anyway.

I wonder if that's a misperception of the play. Are these in fact very rare and special people, because they speak in a special, rarefied way, or are they meant to be everybody?

I think they're both: highly individual, rarefied people who live in the real world.

Well, I'm not trying for that kind of kitchen-sink realism. I think you have to accept it on its terms. But I do want real people up there. Real individuals and real relationships.

I can't imagine four more different playwrights. And this shit perpetuates itself. The bullshit that Virginia Woolf was about two male couples -- every time some damn fool asks you the question because they've read it somewhere, you have to sigh and deny it again, they print your sigh and denial, and it perpetuates the falsehood. I don't know why people don't pay attention. When somebody's told them something isn't true, why don't they just accept it?

Well, they want THAT one again. Son of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Part 3. You know, Tennessee went through the same thing. People start saying, "Gee, he writes the same thing, he's repeating himself." Then he writes Camino Real, which is quite different, and everybody says, "Why doesn't he stick to what he knows?"

Unless you're sitting there plotting out your entire life career and deciding in advance the kind of work you're going to write and the kind of impression you're going to make and what you're after as a dramatist -- unless you're as calculated as that, you've got to be subject to what's going on in your head, the unconscious, your creativity.

I tell my students down here, "Every time you write a play, it should be the first play you've ever written. With any luck, you should try to write the first play anybody's ever written." Which permits you to ignore public expectation, what you've done before. If you give in to that, you start thinking about yourself in the third person. It's very dangerous. You've got to ignore all that stuff, or somehow you're going to be inhibited by it.

I hope not. You never know. Self-deception is the sneakiest thing around. You try to be on guard against it. But what can I say? You can deceive yourself into thinking that you aren't. I don't pretend to have absolute objectivity. I think I'm a little bit more objective than most people.

I don't think it would have been all that different. Maybe a few doors would have been closed a little bit longer. Maybe some of the plays would have had a harder time. This makes things a little easier financially. Everybody has one play that is more famous than others. Then again I haven't finished. Maybe I'll have two or three. Who's to say? These things sort themselves out. I'm not sure the most popular ones are the best ones.

The success they're talking about is not artistic success. They're talking about the fame of the play. What the fuck does the fame of the play have to do with its ultimate value? Absolutely nothing. It is a burden, a welcome burden in one way. I'm delighted that I wrote it. It's a good play, it's made a number of things easier, opened some doors, made things financially easier, all that stuff. It's allowed me not to worry about writing plays like Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. But the only disadvantage, as I've said, is that everybody's waiting for THAT one again, which is so dumb.

A number of fortuitous things happened with Virginia Woolf. It seemed very controversial at the time. Its language seemed far more violent than it was. It was a breath of fresh air, so to speak. Our theater was a much healthier place, more willing to accept an act of aggression than it is now. People want all of that again. That's hard to find. Our theater climate is not the same now. This was the early days of the Kennedy years. I don't think it's possible in this country.

Unfortunately, the majority of people who have the opinions you've been expressing are the audience that regards what happens on Broadway as being the essence of the American theater, rather than what happens in the regionals.

The loyalty is not to Broadway. I just think that we're the only country where our major theater is not where the best plays are done. That's wrong. That's why someone's gotta keep battering his head against the wall. Should serious playwrights become, in a sense, second-class citizens?

You're more of a pessimist than I am.

We shouldn't have that division between the serious theatergoer and the theatergoer. In an ideal society, there wouldn't be that division.

In 1959 when I went to Berlin...why are you laughing?

I saw the Berlin wall go up. I looked at the plays being done in the big Berlin theaters. They were filled with first-rate playwrights: Beckett, Adamov, Goethe, etc. It was never quite that way on Broadway. But it was better.

I think they should be everywhere. I think it's a great pity that Broadway is not feeding these theaters the best of American theater.

It used to.

Okay. I let go.

It was going to open straight on Broadway as a matter of fact. But then Richard Barr, who was the producer, got sick and died.

Yes, Richard was coproducer of Virginia Woolf. Someone said, "Let's be safe and do it Off-Broadway." Richard said, "No, let's do it on Broadway."

Well, it may be my fault. But Broadway should not be given over to junk.

No. The one thing I don't like is that a lot of regional theaters are lowering their standards to produce plays that will then transfer to Broadway. A lot of regional theaters are being used as tryout houses, and I don't think that's the way it should work.

I didn't say the Alley Theater does. I said a lot of theaters do.

No. Considering what the Alley did last year -- Harvey, an awful musical called Jekyll & Hyde, nicely balanced with the Beckett plays and Robert Wilson's thing on When We Dead Awaken, his Thoughts on When We Dead Awaken -- the Alley Theater does unnecessary stuff and necessary stuff. I don't think they lower their standards. I say that some regional theaters quite conscientiously will not do the very best plays like Beckett because they want to save the slot for something they think may have commercial value.

It varies from time to time. There are some that I think do.

Do you think, for example, that the very best plays that are done in the regional theater are the ones that get transferred?

Shouldn't it?

Did you? [sourly, indicating that he didn't]

So you recommend I live in the real world, huh? All right.

Not symbolic.

They were management.

No, everybody had retired by the time I came along. Vaudeville was dead, my father was retired, it wasn't a thriving theater.

I suppose.

It was not a theatrical household. It was anti-theatrical.

Mostly. I think my grandfather was a bright man, and he had some sense that there could be some relationship between excellence and popularity.

God, no, he died when I was a year and a half old.

I have no idea. We weren't in touch.

No.

Ah, no. I never felt that I belonged to my adoptive family anyway.

No. I was terribly private about it. "Oh, he writes -- isn't that cute? He paints -- that's sweet. He'll grow up and become a sensible person."

Damned if I know. Certainly something 10 to 6.

Something like that.

I have no idea. People don't talk to me about it. As I said in the New York Times piece that David Richards wrote, if anybody had ever asked me in interviews if I was gay, I would have told them.

When Mart Crowley wrote that...thing, that play of his, Boys in the Band, we did it at our Playwrights Unit. Richard Barr wanted to produce it and I said I'd have nothing to do with it. I thought it was a loathsome play. Because what it did was reinforce the disgusting homophobic attitudes about stereotypical gays. Generally speaking -- there are a few exceptions here and there, but only because of AIDS, it seems to me -- the plays by gays that have been successful have been the ones that contribute to the heterosexual attitude about what it is to be gay. I found this to be true with Harvey Fierstein. That was perfectly all right, his trilogy was OK, because that's what gay is, the same way as Mart Crowley's play. I'm very angry at plays that permit that.

I got into a lot of trouble at the Out Write conference in San Francisco when I said that playwrights who are gay must not ghettoize, and that there's a lot of rotten gay writing being published and gay readers (and straight readers) are being taken advantage of because it's gay and therefore it's to be read. I said that no writer who happens to be gay has any responsibility to write about a gay theme. Nobody insists that straight writers write about straight themes. Anything that contributes to this awful homophobia that we still have in our society bothers me a lot.

No. I've never made a secret of it, and God knows, these homophobic critics seemed to be aware of the fact that I'm gay.

I thought the point was the fact that you are gay doesn't make it mandatory to write about gay themes.

I have no problem there if the writer's any good.

As I said in the New York Times piece, I've never made a secret of it myself.

I don't think I have been. I know I said over and over again in response to that question, "If I wanted to write a play about two gay couples, I would have done it. I'm fully capable of doing that."

Oh I see. Well, I guess I didn't think that was necessary. The more important point is that any writer no matter what he is if he's any good should be able to write about straights, gays, blacks, whites, the whole thing.

Because I don't see that much difference between gay relationships and straight relationships, if it's being handled properly.

Because it happened to be about straight people. Seriously. I didn't make a conscious choice these are going to be straights, rather than gays. There are some gay people flitting around my plays from time to time. I think Butler in Tiny Alice is probably gay. Certainly Jack in Everything in the Garden is gay.

That's too bad. They should have stayed together. They were much better off together.

Well, it probably couldn't be set in a university in New England, that's for sure. I don't think the president of a small New England college would have tolerated his son having that kind of relationship. And we're talking about up the corporate ladder here. It couldn't have been a play about the power structure of our society as much. It would have to have been a far more parochial piece. Parochiality bothers me in general. Is there such a word as parochiality?

I wish I had liked As Is more than I did. There were some good scenes in that. I don't know that I've seen anything I thought had absolutely first-rate writing.

I suppose you can't stop people from hearing what they want to whether it's dumb or not.

I don't think I used the word "oppressed." I said "minority." I didn't use the word "oppressed" ever.

Well, maybe I misspoke myself. I wasn't as clear as I wanted to be. I tried to point out that I didn't find that any minority I belong to is limiting. To be white, male, educated, gay -- I didn't want any of these to become limiting. I thought it was a rational point of view. I said I hoped gays would not end up with the same overly self-defeating separatism that a lot of blacks have.

I didn't say they were all separatists. People want to hear the word "all." You try to use language with some precision, and people still hear what they want to.

(he sighs) See, I don't think in terms of "This writer is lesbian, this one is that." You must understand this: my mind is like a sieve. I read a great deal and I forget everything. Really. I have the intense experience of something while I'm doing it, and then I forget about it. Until someone reminds me of it, and I think, "Oh yeah, I liked that." Then when anybody asks me for the lists -- contemporary playwrights you admire, who's influenced you, what lesbian writers do you like -- I just don't have these lists. I come up absolutely blank. I don't remember a fucking thing that I do. Except that a character I'm writing might quote from something that I don't remember having read. Which means obviously I read it and don't remember. I don't remember very much.

Sometimes I make up quotes.

Oh, it covers most of his life. I'm interested in the relationship between governments and the creative act, the oppression of creative people for a number of reasons. Lorca had three good things going for him, all of which contributed to his silencing: the fact that he was an intellectual, the fact that he was a leftist, the fact that he was gay.

I'm not going to go through his life entirely, but yes, he's the central character. The parallel rise of Lorca and Franco. I'm not sure the Lorca family is going to be very happy about what I do.

They're trying to create this image of Lorca as no different from anybody else. He had a limp? No! Periods of depression? No! Any mention of his being gay creates a blanched silence from the family.

There used to be a few more, they're dying. Time does it. AIDS does it. I still have a few whose intelligence and emotional honesty I respect.

Uh, goodness, let the guilty be nameless.

American Theatre, 1992

  
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