His Eye’s Not on the Prize : Third Pulitzer Hasn’t Made Edward Albee Any Mellower

The last time Edward Albee won the Pulitzer Prize--in 1975 for “Seascape”--the late producer Richard Barr joked, “We were burning the sets of the play when we heard the news.” That’s what producers do when a show closes. The drama had failed on Broadway, playing only 65 performances.

On April 11, when news of his third Pulitzer Prize, this time for the drama “Three Tall Women,” reached the playwright, he was in Texas, where he is playwright-in-residence at the University of Houston.

“It’s terribly discouraging,” he said facetiously when interviewed on the phone early the next morning. “It makes one all grumpy and sad. Grump. Grump.”

The comment itself is vintage Albee: a hint of a wicked self-mockery, mixed with reproof that a reporter would even ask how it feels to regain critical stature after nearly three decades of dismissive--often brutal--reviews and audience neglect. What do awards and public approbation have to do with the work at hand, which is, after all, writing plays?

Still, a note of triumph can’t help but creep into his soft, slight raspy voice when the 66-year-old playwright adds: “Of course, I’m surprised and delighted. But then I’m surprised when I don’t win awards, too. Every artist has many lives and deaths and you really can’t afford to think too much about it. There’s never been much of a link between quality and popular acceptance, so you just keep on doing it on the assumption that you’re doing good work.”

Albee’s fall from commercial and critical approbation had been all the more precipitous given his stunning successes in the early ‘60s, first with a widely hailed Off Broadway production of “Zoo Story,” and then, on Broadway, with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” his acid-etched marital slugfest later translated to the screen in 1966 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Since then it’s been a long dry spell. One would have to go all the way back to 1983 to find a work of his on Broadway, “The Man With Three Arms,” which received withering reviews and died quickly. Until recently, only academia and regional and foreign theaters have welcomed the playwright.

In fact, his work had rarely been seen in New York at all until last fall, when the Signature Theatre, a small 77-seat house in downtown Manhattan decided to devote an entire season to his work. His latest play, “Fragments,” opened two weeks ago and was the last in a lineup that included five New York premieres and two revivals. Like most of the other plays at the Signature, this abstract and enigmatic chamber piece met with respectful if unenthusiastic notices.

The New York critics’ acclaim and the Pulitzer was reserved for “Three Tall Women,” a play that received its world premiere in Vienna in 1991 and then played a now-defunct Upstate New York theater before bowing at Manhattan’s Vineyard Theatre in January. The response was so strong that the production moved almost immediately to an open-ended commercial run at Off Broadway’s Promenade Theatre.

In “Three Tall Women” an imperious 92-year-old woman played by 64-year-old veteran actress Myra Carter, simply identified by the letter “A,” is based on Albee’s rich socialite mother, Frances, whose tempestuous relationship with her son led her to disinherit him. She repeatedly told him, “I’m sorry I ever adopted you.”

Albee gets his revenge. In the first act, she is an addled but remarkably feisty dowager who can’t remember if she’s 91 or 92. She alternately tyrannizes and is tyrannized by her young lawyer, “C,” (Jordan Baker) and a middle-aged companion, “B” (Marian Seldes). At the end of the first act, the elderly woman suffers a stroke. At the beginning of the second act, what the audience takes to be her body lies motionless on a bed. But all three actresses suddenly materialize, each representing a different period in the matron’s life. Sparring with their respectively younger or older selves, they review a lifetime of bent hopes and schemes with regret and lacerating humor.

Last fall, as he prepared “Three Tall Women” for its New York premiere, Albee reviewed his own life and career in his spacious TriBeCa loft, one of his three residences. Frances Albee may have disinherited him, but the playwright’s early success made him a rich man. Against the backdrop of his stunning collection of primitive and contemporary art, the playwright spoke of the “tough old bird” who inspired the play that would represent his comeback.

“She was destructive and contemptible but there were reasons for her behavior, as there always are,” he said. “Writing the play allowed me to understand her better, though I’m not sure I liked her any more or less than I already did.”

Although he insisted that he isn’t the type of writer who usually draws on his own life for subject matter, he admitted that writing “Three Tall Women” was a form of exorcism. “I just tried to get it all down,” he said. “It’s the theme: What is worse than coming to the end of your life filled with regret? I was interested in the facts, man, just the facts: the good stuff, the bad, the misplaced pride. The facts carry implications with them.”

It has been often suggested that the playwright’s steely iconoclasm and alienation stems from his adoption as a baby by Reed and Frances Albee, his father a wealthy scion of a vaudeville house chain and his mother a striking and ambitious one-time store model turned socialite. Their rebellious son, who grew up in a Larchmont, N.Y., mansion, got kicked out of a number of boarding schools and Trinity College before heading for Greenwich Village to steep himself deeply in the ‘50s counterculture and avant-garde.

He found his family’s bourgeois values “detestable” and excoriated them in his 1961 play “An American Dream” and in his first Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “A Delicate Balance” in 1967. Although he got along better with his father--he is recalled both with affection and bitterness in “Three Tall Women”--Albee rarely returned home once he’d left.

Albee says that Frances was ambivalent about her son’s stunning, if short-lived, early triumphs. On one hand, the social climber in her loved the celebrity and the famous people who eagerly sought out the enfant terrible of Broadway to boost the cachet of their dinner parties. On the other hand, she denigrated his bohemian and gay lifestyle. (In “Three Tall Women,” the old woman is obviously homophobic, making a scathing reference to her son’s young lovers.)

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His new work appears to be as corrosive and cutting as ever, especially when it comes to marriage. In typical Albee fashion, recrimination, reproof and betrayal affect the marriages represented not only in “Three Tall Women” but in two of his New York premieres at the Signature, “Finding the Sun,” from 1982, and “Marriage Play” (1987). In the latter, he replays some of the airless and stultifying territory of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; in the former, he scopes out new ground by presenting a gay couple who are no longer living together because, due to societal pressures, they have gotten mired in terribly unhappy marriages with women.

“I’m not against marriage,” Albee said. “I’ve only railed against people who’ve continued in a relationship beyond its usefulness and continue in it dishonestly. It’s the misuse and self-delusion that bothers me.”

Indeed, the man who has so wittily and viciously assailed the institution of marriage in his work takes a certain pride in his own long-term gay relationships, the present one having lasted for 23 years. He said he was the “happiest” he’s been in years.

Yet despite the domestic calm, he is at the same time insistent on the writer’s role as social provocateur and critic. Sometimes playwriting attacks the problems directly, as in David Mamet’s work, he explains, and other times, the approach is more subtle and ambiguous, as in his own. To those activists who fault him for not having written a play about AIDS, he responds that they don’t understand his work.

“I think all my plays confront being alive and how to behave with the awareness of death,” he says. “If AIDS, on one level, is about how we, as a society, do not deal with what we don’t want to deal with, if it is also about whether we should or not, then my plays have been about that from the very beginning. I now have a play I’m writing that tangentially touches on the matter of AIDS that will make a number of people very angry, but it’s no departure for me.”

For decades, Albee has delighted in provoking audiences. (He maintained that he’d love to write screenplays but Hollywood hasn’t exactly been beating down his door.) Yet, amid the bleakness and rage of his new work, one can detect the barest hint of redemption, if not optimism, seeping through. Yet the playwright will brook no suggestion that he has in any way mellowed over the years.

“Grump, grump,” Albee mocks again, at the suggestion that perhaps the bloodletting in his plays lends a certain lucidity to the characters that will make the future, however limited, more hopeful. “I hope what you’re suggesting is not a softening of my head,” he said. “I do have persistent angers and concerns, you know.”

He insisted that he would continue to mine those angers and concerns whether they met with popular and critical acceptance or not. “Yeah, I want to reach as wide an audience as possible but, alas, on my own terms. I don’t want to compromise or oversimplify just to give myself the illusion of accomplishment. You start lying, telling half-truths, well, what’s the point? Ascribe it to my arrogance--an arrogance that any artist in the United States has got to have to survive--but I can’t really approach my work in any other way.”