He Isn’t About to Let Up Now

Edward Albee sits in Joe Allen’s, a theater-district restaurant in midtown Manhattan, sipping a cappuccino and looking at the picture of a handsome, brooding young man. It is he, at age 31 in 1959, just before “The Zoo Story” established him as a stunning new theatrical talent, and two years before that judgment was confirmed by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” his drama of marital discord and delusion.

“Not bad,” he says, allowing a faint smile to cut through his usual astringency. The photo graces the cover of Mel Gussow’s “Edward Albee: A Singular Journey” (Applause Books). Asked what he thinks of the biography, which meticulously traces his four decades in theater and more than two dozen works, the playwright says sardonically, “It comes out OK.” Pause. “For volume 1.”

Albee is now 72, but the infirmities of age--an arthritic hip, a hearing aid--have done nothing to slow down the onetime enfant terrible. In the course of a freewheeling interview--during which he blisters the state of the theater, the social and political decline of the country, and the desperate follies of human interaction--the playwright makes it clear that he’s hard at work providing fodder for volume 2. “I hope I’m subversive,” he says at one point. “The country could use a little subversion.” Despite the fact that America has appeared to learn very little in the last half-century--”either from experience or from my plays,” Albee adds, “I hope I can still do a little useful damage.”

Indeed, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner appears to be lobbing his existential grenades rather prolifically these days. A major revival of “Tiny Alice,” his 1964 metaphysical puzzler, just finished a run at New York’s Second Stage, garnering more favorable reviews than its first time around, particularly for star Richard Thomas; his drama “The Play About the Baby,” which premiered in London to mixed notices a couple of years ago, opens a commercial run at Manhattan’s Century Center on Feb. 1; and a new production of “A Delicate Balance,” the 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about existential despair that was revived on Broadway four years ago and won numerous Tony Awards, opens at South Coast Repertory on Friday.

This year should also see major revivals of “Virginia Woolf” (this summer at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis) and yet another American premiere: “The Lorca Play,” about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

“I’m going to just keep doing whatever led to volume 1,” says Albee, denying that his current fertility is the result of a sense of impending mortality. He cooperated fully with Gussow on “Singular Journey,” opening up private correspondence with family, peers and former lovers (including a seven-year relationship with celebrated playwright Terrence McNally), which animate the biography. They provide a more playful portrait of the taciturn playwright than one might expect: a writer who admires “Pal Joey’ and 1930s musicals more than current fare, who reveres humorist James Thurber and puppeteer Burr Tillstrom (“Kukla, Fran & Ollie”) as much, if not more, than Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco.

Pleased with the biography, he has no desire to pen his own memoirs. “‘It’s all in the plays, the results are more interesting than me,” he says about what he has described as his “solo journey--through consciousness toward the end of consciousness.”

Indeed, despite the playwright’s ambivalence about looking for parallels between his personal life and his work, the fabric of “Singular Journey” is woven from such connections. The book suggests that “The Zoo Story,” drew from Albee’s brief stint as a Western Union messenger boy; that the warring couple of “Virginia Woolf” is partly based on academics at Wagner College on Staten Island, its title taken from graffiti Albee saw on the mirror of a West Village gay bar; and that “A Delicate Balance” reflects the upper-class, Westchester County, N.Y., WASP environment of the playwright’s adoptive parents, Reed and Frances Albee, against whom he so ferociously rebelled. Throughout his life, he would write mercilessly about the despair and denial hidden in the folds of the drapes, the tufts of the expensive leather couches, the clink of the ice cubes in a martini glass.

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One of Albee’s most accessible plays, “A Delicate Balance” camouflages its attacks on the well-appointed lives of its protagonists with the conventions of drawing-room comedy. The patient Tobias and his wife, Agnes, a steely matriarch, are coping with their dysfunctional family--Agnes’ alcoholic sister, Claire (who has a yen for Tobias), and their daughter, Julia, who comes home after her fourth marriage self-destructs. Suddenly, their best friends, Harry and Edna, arrive at their doorstep, fleeing a nameless terror they suddenly found lurking in their house, “a plague,” they call it. They insist that they must move in, thereby upsetting the delicate balance of the home--and Agnes and Tobias in turn must confront the limits of friendship as well as their own anxieties.

“It’s about people who have come to the end of their lives and have come to the conclusion that they haven’t lived them,” says Albee. “That self-awareness is kept at bay. If you don’t do things when you’re supposed to, you become incapable of change. Agnes and Tobias are both intelligent enough to know the compromises they’ve made and they’re living with them.”

Though the domestic travails of “A Delicate Balance” would seem to have as much to do with the state of the union as the titanic battles at the heart of “Virginia Woolf,” Albee says that all of his work is “very, very political.” With unusual emotion, he welcomes the suggestion that the denial and delusion at the heart of the play has a parallel in today’s political and social culture. As a liberal creative artist and gay man, the playwright is, not surprisingly, dismayed and disgusted with the outcome of the recent election. He notes that when “A Delicate Balance” was revived on Broadway, he chose to change only two lines, which he will insist upon in the South Coast Rep production: one was an inconsequential reference to topless bathing suits. The other was a line said by Tobias to Julia in response to her question about what he’s reading in the newspaper. Albee says he changed “Our dear Republicans, dull as ever” to “Our dear Republicans, brutal as ever.”

“My plays are all about how we choose to live our lives, the avoidances, the compromises, and that all affects how we vote, how we think about ourselves in a participatory, evolving revolutionary democracy,” he says. “I think we’re in very serious trouble as a country through our passivity and our greed, and our fear of not being controlled.”

Such concerns partly fueled “The Lorca Play,” only his second work, next to “The Death of Bessie Smith,” to deal with a historical figure (not counting the riveting and monstrous portrait of his mother, Frances, in “Three Tall Women,” the 1994 play that brought him his third Pulitzer and reestablished his critical standing). Albee says that he’d long admired Garcia Lorca’s plays and poetry, and was fascinated by the bizarre circumstances of his death at the hands of Franco’s squads. Garcia Lorca refused to leave Spain even though many of his peers, like Salvador Dali, urged him to.

“He was killed basically because he was a creative artist, a leftist and gay, three very good reasons in many societies to kill somebody,” says Albee. “I thought I would examine some of that and his strange foolishness that led him into situations where he would not survive.” Asked whether this was a martyr’s compulsion, which Brother Julian brings up in “Tiny Alice,” he replies, “No, I just think Lorca was a little giddy, fairly willful and self-indulgent.”

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Critics have often applied those same terms to Albee, particularly during the dozen years preceding “Three Tall Women” when he was dismissed as having lost his touch, a has-been. The nadir came in 1982. After the flops of “The Lady From Dubuque” and his adaptation of Nabokov’s “Lolita,” he endured the humiliating failure of “The Man Who Had Three Arms,” a scabrous meditation on the freakish nature of fame and the media. After the critics lambasted him, it was generally believed that Albee was finished on Broadway. He spent his exile (happily, he says) partly in Europe, where he often directed productions of his plays, and partly at the University of Houston, where he intends to teach for at least the next three years. “Sometimes you’re in fashion, sometimes you’re not,” he says philosophically. “The only thing that bothers me about the attacks is that they seem to be very, very personal, attacks on me, rather than having to do with the success or failure of a play.”

Albee attributes that to the fact that he has never been able “to keep my mouth shut about critics” and he obliges again when the subject of “The Play About the Baby” is brought up. When it premiered in London, many reviewers were mystified by the drama. Variety critic Matt Wolf called it essential, if minor, Albee--with its themes of delusion and unspeakable fears masked by humor and experimentation. Like many of his colleagues, Wolf suggested it was an extended riff on “Virginia Woolf” with its four characters--an older couple, simply called Man and Woman, and a younger couple, Boy and Girl, whose baby becomes an object of plunder for the former.

“The play has no relationship with ‘Virginia Woolf’ at all, structurally, psychologically and philosophically, except maybe something having to do with truth and illusion,” says Albee. “But the opposite structures are there. In ‘Virginia Woolf,’ there’s a nonexistent child. In ‘Play About the Baby,’ there’s a real baby. No question about it.”

Despite such clarifications, Albee would rather not explain his work, either to critics or the public. It smacks too much of an apology, he says, and besides, if a person is willing to experience a play on its own terms, it should not be confusing. He has the same hopes for his newest work, “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?,” which is reportedly about a man who falls in love with his goat. It’s a reflection on how love alters the perceptions of those involved, according to those who have read it. Albee chooses only to say that it should be a rather “provocative” experience.

“I think if a play is worth paying attention to, then it’s worth thinking about afterwards and maybe learning something from it,” he says. “But most people want tidy, frivolous stuff, so they can go home and not worry about what they’ve seen.”

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Given the present corporate climate on Broadway, it seems almost incomprehensible to realize that Albee’s highly experimental “Box-Mao-Box” was presented there in 1968. Indeed, with the exception of “A Delicate Balance,” there has not been a Broadway production of an Albee play since “Man Who Had Three Arms.” “Three Tall Women,” like “Play About the Baby,” was presented off-Broadway, where “The Lorca Play” is also likely to end up. The playwright says adventurous work is being kept from the Broadway stage by economics and the power of theater owners. “I think there must be, or certainly should be, something patently illegal about the fact that theater owners can reject fully financed serious plays in favor of something they think is going to make more money,” he says. “You can’t do that in renting an apartment, how can you do it renting a commercial space?”

He also finds problematic the mechanisms in place to help develop new work through readings, workshops and regional productions. “I think they’re fairly bankrupt,” he says. “I think any experience which can help a playwright make his or her play closer to what is intended, that’s OK. But so much so-called play development is geared to make them safe, not make them better, to tailor the plays toward commerce and I find that a criminal act.”

The culprits are various, according to Albee. Producers who want a commercial product; regional theaters whose backers want to see choices that reflect their taste; critics who discourage experimentation; audiences who want untroubled experiences; playwrights who sell out. The solution is a bit harder to effect. But he points to Europe and the emphasis there on arts education--something that is seriously imperiled in the United States as arts courses are being dropped right and left. “We are raising a generation of barbarians who don’t have any aesthetic experience,” he says. “How can they possibly make any valid judgments about what is art and what is not?”

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Albee appears resigned to laboring in an art form with “minority participation,” as he puts it. He’s never been tempted to write for film (“I don’t believe in corporate creativity,” he says), though he admits to being generally happy with Mike Nichols’ adaptation of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Tony Richardson’s “A Delicate Balance.” The latter did have a bogus ending, he adds, with Katharine Hepburn’s Agnes throwing open the shutters at dawn and uttering hopefully, “Now we can begin the day.’ The mood is much more akin to Beckett’s tramps in “Waiting for Godot.” “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Stage direction: Nobody moves.

Albee himself seems unafflicted by the paralysis that stymies his characters. “The alternative to living in the moment” is the sludge of regret. “I would much rather be unhappy about things that I have done rather than things that I have not,” he says. “You can explain away things that you have done. But things that you haven’t done, it’s your own fault.”

As for his legacy, he says that he will leave that to other people and the divination of time. “The ultimate value of any play is not going to be determined until at least 75 years after it’s written,” he notes. “The term ‘great’ being thrown around randomly for stuff that’s 2 years old is preposterous. Snap judgments, either bandwagoning or attacking, for or against you, either way it’s ridiculous.”

Given that his work so often deals with deluded characters, Albee is asked whether he entertains any particular delusions about himself. “Oh, that I’m going to live forever, I guess,” he says with a smile. “But I don’t spend much time thinking of my dying. I’m so disapproving of death. It’s such a waste of time.”