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
It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.
I suppose if you simplify things, it's going to make it easier to understand.
The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.
The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.
that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential.'
I think there are perhaps four playwrights of the 20th century that we could not have done without: Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett. If you've got those four, you've got the century covered.
Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.
The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.
It's hard to explain, or even remember, it now. All four of them were down there underwater, but it's too complicated to go into. I thought it was better just to eliminate it. If it had been necessary, I wouldn't have been able to cut it so easily. It still exists. It's probably in The Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library, but it can't be performed.
I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window.
The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.
Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.