As he explained to me in 1992, in the first of several interviews I had with Albee, he never had an interest in a sequel to his masterwork. “Because I said what I wanted to say about those people. That’s it. And if they like that one so much, they should just keep seeing it, not ask me to go back and repeat myself.”
(Ironically, that interview took place just prior to the American premiere of his Marriage Play, which has the most distinct echoes of Virginia Woolf.)
Born in 1928 in Northern Virginia to parents he never knew, he was adopted by Reed Albee, the heir to the Keith-Albee vaudeville theater chain, and socialite Frances Cotter Albee, the mother from whom he was estranged for much of his adult life. Brought up in a life of privilege, young Edward was shuttled between suburban Larchmont, N.Y., and Palm Beach, a curious place he recalled for me in vivid detail.
“I probably had a pretty good time here,” he conceded. “I didn’t realize how corrupt the values were of so many of the people who lived there then.”
After being thrown out of a few well-heeled prep schools, Albee left home at 18, moved to Greenwich Village, proclaimed his homosexuality and began writing plays that would challenge audiences and the very foundations of the American theater.
He first came to attention with a one-act play in the early days of off-Broadway, The Zoo Story, which established him as a precision wordsmith with an affinity for the absurd. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, about a booze-fueled night of truths and delusions between two university couples, was recommended for a Pulitzer, but its frank language and emotional violence so shocked the prize’s board that it adamantly refused to give him the award.
Three years later, when he did win the Pulitzer for A Delicate Balance, it was no belated consolation prize, but a recognition of his consummate skill for a wholly different play, an understated tale of undefined terror that grips an upper-crust couple.
Still, Albee’s plays have not always been embraced, either by the critics or by audiences. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Albee fell out of favor, as he churned out such flawed works as The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms and Finding the Sun.
He considered the negative reception these plays got from the media a natural part of one’s career ups and downs. As he told me, “You examine the history of contemporary theater in America and after somebody’s been around for a while, the carping starts. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the work being any less good that before.”
Albee was not one to stay down long, however, as he demonstrated with his 1990 comeback – yes, a word he hated – with Three Tall Women, arguably his most personal play, about a wealthy widow seen before and after a debilitating stroke. The character was patterned after his adoptive mother with a frankness that earned him his final Pulitzer and the best reviews of his career.
As he told me in a 1996 interview as the play was on tour and heading to Palm Beach, writing it allowed him to exorcise her from his consciousness. “It amazes me that I never think about my adoptive mother now that I’ve written the play,” he said. “I think about the character occasionally, but I don’t think about her very much.”
In the latter half of his career, Albee took to directing his plays, teaching at various universities and keeping a sharp eye on the numerous productions of his play around the country and the world. Perhaps because of an all-male production of Virginia Woolf that he scorned, Albee would withhold the performance rights to his plays until he saw head shots and bios of the prospective cast members. While this is commonplace for a major Broadway production or revival, he took the practice to resident nonprofit companies such as Palm Beach Dramaworks, which has presented several of Albee’s plays.
Until his death at his home in Montauk, Long Island, Albee was widely considered America’s greatest living playwright. The cause of death has not been reported, but his personal assistant notes that it followed a short illness.