STUDENTS GET A DOSE OF ALBEE

One of the American theater’s most praised and panned playwrights came to town this week to do one of his favorite things--talk and work with children involved in theater--and ended up reveling in another treat, lobbing figuratively fiery Molotov cocktails at his nemeses, the American theater critics.

Edward Albee (pronounced ALL-bee) is here at the request of Deborah Salzer, founder of the California Young Playwrights Project. For four days he has been working with high school students enrolled in the project and with drama students at San Diego State University.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner took time out Tuesday for a friendly chat with the press. Albee, 57, blithely handed down his thoughts about a number of subjects, from the talent of youth to those journalists who are “ill-equipped to judge their betters.” He discussed play writing and Broadway--the commercial theater versus historical theater, which he considers to be an art form.

The man who startled a drowsing national theater scene in 1962 with his searing drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” talked about the state of theater today, comparing the American scene with the European. Particularly, he welcomes the contact with children.

“I like talking to (students) because--in theory, at least, people of that age have not completely made up their minds, so maybe I can get at them. . . . I believe there’s a strong relationship between people’s being aesthetically informed and their being able to govern themselves,” Albee has said.

Albee presided at a workshop for selected students at San Diego High and will conduct another workshop at Torrey Pines High today, after which he will discuss the importance of funding instruction in the arts with administrators and legislators. He also held workshops with drama students at San Diego State University on acting and design for his plays. On Thursday, Albee read and discussed his works as part of SDSU’s Joseph Fisch Theatre Lecture Series.

“There’s great value in training kids to think clearly about art,” he said Tuesday. “The best way is to engulf them and surround them by the arts while they’re too young to know exactly what it is.” His own early interest in classical music, Albee is convinced, stemmed from his Saturday afternoon naps when a nurse “tossed me down on the bed” and turned on the weekly Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast.

He also “grew up with good paintings around the house, discovering (the books of) Turgenev in the house library when I was 11 . . . “

If Albee had his way, children would receive a megadose of the arts at school. “If the Beethoven (violin) quartets were playing during rest period at kindergarten and great contemporary art is on the walls at school, the kids are going to assimilate it,” he said.

“The thing that is so interesting to me is that the people that dislike modern art--who go into a museum and see a Jackson Pollock and throw up--those people are seeing exactly the same work in commercial advertising and it doesn’t bother them. It’s the context.

“So you surround people with art.”

After “Virginia Woolf,” Albee won his first Pulitzer for “A Delicate Balance” in 1966 and his second for “Seascape” in 1975. More recently he has been raked over the critical coals for three plays: “The Lady From Dubuque”; “Lolita,” his adaptation of Nabokov’s novel, and “The Man Who Had Three Arms.” The last was his most recent play, and he said it was “absolutely blasted” by the New York critics.

Some critics have even had the temerity to suggest that Albee 10 years ago entered his “late style” of writing. He figures, rather, that he is in his middle stage. Albee claims 24 plays to his credit, and, working at a rate of one a year, says he’s good for another 24. He has two under commission, “about the same old thing--people, their relationships with each other, getting along, not getting along.”

Asked if playwrights are formed or made, Albee, who was adopted by a family with a theatrical tradition--his adoptive grandfather once owned a vaudeville circuit of 70 theaters--said he believes strongly in natural talent. Asked which is more important to a writer--talent, luck or hard work--Albee singled out talent.

The problem with criticism in America is the role of critics, who he said form “an impenetrable barrier” between the audience and theater as an art form and “misinform the public” about the purpose of theater.

“This is the only country that takes what a critic says for fact,” he said.

In the United States, he said, somebody evolved the “bizarre notion” that plays were written for critical approval. In Europe, he said, the audiences do not take what a critic says for fact. “They take it as either an informed or uninformed opinion, depending on what they know of the mind of the critic,” Albee said. “It’s a healthy situation.

“But we have a very healthy situation in our regional and off-Broadway theater,” which he said is where the best plays are being staged.

How, then, would he solve the problem? By letting creative people be critics. “I learn more about how I practice my craft by the opinion of other people who practice the arts than I do from almost any critic writer.” For “The Man Who Had Three Arms” Albee “probably got more praise from other people in the creative arts than for any play I have ever written.”

As for a practical solution to the problem of critics?

“Shoot ‘em.”

But he added quickly with a gleam in his eye, “We want to hurt them, so it shouldn’t be in the head.”