THEATER AND FILM : Who’s Afraid of Critics? It Sure Isn’t Edward Albee

He has been on the scene for nearly 30 years now, and most audiences and critics still don’t seem to know what to make of Edward Albee, who remains one of America’s best-known but most enigmatic and exasperating playwrights.

Although he has received two Pulitzer Prizes, and though his “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” from 1962 is one of the landmark works of the American theater, Albee’s more recent work generally is seen as far too abstract and remote.

But speaking Sunday at Loara High School in Anaheim, Albee was not about to call a truce with his detractors. Although he had turned 60 the day before and was dressed rather tamely in a tweed jacket and gray slacks, his manner was still that of the intense, renegade artist.

“I’ve written 26 plays and some, like ‘Virginia Woolf,’ have had a measure of popularity,” he told an audience of 250 students and adults during a two-hour visit sponsored by the California Young Playwrights Project and Anaheim Union High School District.

His other works, he acknowledged, have been “enormously unpopular” because people find “these too difficult or are offended by them. But,” he added, “these are the same ones I consider among my best.”

The visit to Loara underscored the irony of Albee’s celebrity status as both maverick hero and theatrical outcast: His acerbic, at times self-mocking observations have made him a hit on the campus lecture circuit, even though he remains one of the least frequently staged major American playwrights in commercial or community theaters.

Next month, when the newly organized Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana presents Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner “Seascape,” it will be the first local production of the play in more than a decade (the Laguna Playhouse staged it in 1976).

Yet Albee the lecturer and academic workshop leader is in great demand. He was an artist-in-residence in 1983-84 at UC Irvine. He appeared last March at Loara High, also for the California Young Playwrights Project, a program for developing student authors that originated in San Diego. And next month he will be at Cal State Fullerton, lecturing to the public on April 14 and conducting a master class for theater majors the following day.

Albee’s stint Sunday at Loara was typical. He regaled his audience with tales that over the years have proven sure to charm. He spoke, for instance, of the way well-to-do parents used to pack troublesome children like him off to military schools--”instead of reform schools.” And of how he plunged into writing as a youth “but failed as a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer and a novelist.” The most laughter came when he spoke of discovering play writing at age 30. It proved a “natural niche” for him, the way being “an ax murderer or a politician” is for others, he said.

Albee’s chief task at Loara was to critique scenes from two of his plays as performed by Orange County and Los Angeles actors and Long Beach City College theater majors and to field questions about his play writing.

The first scene (directed by Playwrights Project official Pamela Richarde) was from the black comedy “Everything in the Garden,” Albee’s 1967 adaptation for Broadway of a play by Giles Cooper of England.

The story, Albee explained, is about a “yuppie-ish suburban couple” who are “living wildly beyond their means.” Suddenly, the husband discovers that his wife has taken an odd job--as a $250-a-day call girl.

“It’s an ugly story, really, but funny,” Albee said at scene’s end, noting that the action eventually leads to murder. “But I call it a comedy,” he stressed, again drawing laughter, “because everybody’s happy at the end.”

The scene from “Seascape” is offbeat even for Albee. It involves two couples, one a pair of “English-speaking” lizards from beneath the sea.

The scene (directed by Long Beach City College teacher Greg Atkins) provides a platform for Albee’s sweeping commentary on everything from adultery and bigotry to mortality and evolution.

Albee regards both “Seascape” and “Everything in the Garden” as characteristic of his serio-comical approach. “I love the juxtaposition of laughter and seriousness,” he said. “People always seem surprised that my plays are that funny.”

Overall, he argued, a playwright’s task is to reflect life clearly and honestly. “The theater should be a mirror of our society,” Albee said, “but the trouble is that too many people want a fun house--a distorted view. They want more escapism. They don’t want to engage truth.”

What’s next for Albee?

He still plans to produce “Finding the Sun,” the play he premiered four years ago at UC Irvine. And he expects to stage his latest work, “Marriage Play,” this fall in New York. It would be his first venture on Broadway since 1983’s short-lived “The Man Who Had Three Arms.”

Meanwhile, Albee is all but silent about two plays in progress. “One is about incest.” Then mocking his own crypticness, he added: “The other--well, is not about incest.”