Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee IIIis an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His works are often considered as well-crafted, realistic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 March 1928
CountryUnited States of America
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.
Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work.
I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.
I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.
Im not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, Im rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.
In the theater, which is a sort of jungle, one does have to be a little bit careful. One mustn't be so rigid or egotistical to think that every comma is sacrosanct. But at the same time there is the danger of losing control and finding that somebody else has opened a play and not you.
I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.
Progress is a set of assumptions.
There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.
The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?
There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.