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
Edward Albee quotes about
A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he's been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they've done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.
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.
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 don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that's their problem as much as mine.
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.
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.