PUPILS, ALBEE BRAINSTORM

Randy Coull was a little terrified.

A senior at Chula Vista High School, Coull did not look forward to having his first play critiqued by playwright Edward Albee--the same Edward Albee whose angry drama, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” first shocked audiences in the early 1960s. The same Edward Albee who won Pulitzer Prizes for “A Delicate Balance” and “Seascape.”

“I was a bit in awe of what he had done,” Coull said. “I had the impression he was a very moody person, that his swings are rapid and huge. I was sweating it. I was almost not going to have it read.”

But a section of Coull’s play, “Not Enough Time,” about a garbage man who falls in love with a girl from outer space, was read to Albee, and to more than 100 students who crowded into a room Tuesday at Chula Vista High.

Coull said he was wrong to worry about Albee. “He didn’t strike me (as moody) at all.”

Dressed in comfortable-looking shoes, gray slacks and a gray short-sleeve knit shirt, his long hair almost reaching his shoulders, Albee charmed a roomful of would-be playwrights from Chula Vista, Coronado, Grossmont and Montgomery high schools and Southwest Junior High.

Albee is making a whirlwind tour of area schools this week on behalf of the California Young Playwrights Project.

For Coull and Fred Goya, whose musical, “No More Saturdays,” was critiqued by Albee, Tuesday turned out to be one of the highlights of their lives.

“He gave me a marvelous idea for expanding (the musical),” Goya said. “I was pleasantly surprised to find him so informal.”

Albee’s style is to ask questions rather than criticize directly. After hearing Coull’s play, Albee peppered him with questions: “What started this in your mind? Does she explain why people on (her) planet look like us? How’s her English? What’s meant to have happened to us by the end of the play? Why would you assume she’s really from another (planet)?”

“His advice has helped a great deal,” Coull said after the session. “I’ve been thinking about many of the things he said. The idea of changing some things helps a great deal--things I hadn’t thought of. He just sort of suggests, gets you to think.”

Before hearing excerpts from the two plays, Albee answered questions from his young audience:

Q: What do you think makes good theater?

A: My definition of good theater is something I like . . . something that leaves me different.

Q: How do you keep a play in your mind a couple of years?

A: Damned if I know.

Albee also advised the students to immerse themselves in the plays of great playwrights, naming Chekhov and Beckett. But he told them to also read bad plays, failures that are popular so they could see that “I can do that well.”

For Albee, talking with students is “a different kind of sharing” from writing plays.

“They ask different questions than theoretical adults,” Albee said. “And so I end up asking different questions, too.”