You know, if you're going to spend a couple of hours of your life listening to string quartets or being at plays or going to a museum and looking at paintings, something should happen to you. "If it's merely decorative, it's a waste of time. Regardless of the style and the language of each play, Brantley says, Albee displayed a rigorous clarity of purpose.īrantley says Albee believed that "theater should hold up a mirror to society - but not just a mimetic mirror - not just to show us what we have, but to show us what's beneath, what's to the side to force us to look at things from another perspective." "I think Edward's punctuation - the ellipses, the number of periods, of dots after a line - if you allow it to go into you, as you would if you were going to sing, you would follow what he suggests." "I feel it's like a piece of music, a musical score," she said. Seldes said that as an actress, she appreciated Albee's precise, grammatically expressive language. The late Marian Seldes starred in several Albee plays - including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women, a play all about Albee's adoptive mother. "We didn't belong in the same family."īut it did become grist for his mill. "These people who adopted me I didn't like very much and they didn't like me very much, I don't think," Albee said. He was adopted, as an infant, by Reed and Frances Albee - his father ran a chain of vaudeville theaters - and his relationship with them was chilly.
"Who we are, how we permit ourselves to be viewed, how we permit ourselves to view ourselves, how we practice identity or lack of identity."Īlbee's questioning of identity came from a deep personal place. "You know, if anybody wants me to say it, in one sentence, what my plays are about: They're about the nature of identity," he said. Edward Albee asks questions - the most basic existential questions - he confronts death, he confronts sex with, I think, eyes that remain very wide open."ĭespite his protests, when we discussed his plays, Albee let this slip out: Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. "I'm not talking about questions of politics or immediate topical issues. Edward Albee list of famous monologues with associated characters and shows. Bigsby castle characters Charlie Claire daughter Death of Bessie Delicate Balance describes dying Educational Theater Journal Edward Albee emotional father feelings nal.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief. Afraid of Virginia Agnes and Tobias Albee’s American Dream Anne Paolucci Anthony Hopkins audience become beginning Bessie Smith Best Friend Box and Quotations C.W.E. "Is there anyone else who dares to take on questions that are that big?" Brantley asks. Best Sellers Rank: 5,170,267 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 43,939 in Dramas & Plays (Books) 79,276 in Performing Arts (Books) Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Albee's plays have challenged, engaged and, at times, confounded audiences since he first burst upon the scene in 1960 with The Zoo Story - an unsettling and, ultimately, shocking encounter between two men in Central Park.īen Brantley, chief theater critic of The New York Times, thinks Albee was one of the great American dramatists.