Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?

By Roger Paradiso

Playwright Edward Albee (1912-2016) was abandoned by his parents soon after birth, and was adopted by a wealthy family in the Vaudeville business who lived in Larchmont, New York. He attended all the wealthy schools his adopted parents thought were appropriate for him, graduating from Choate, a prestigious prep school. He dropped out of Trinity College, ending his academic career. Then, he thought he was a poet and followed his muse to Greenwich Village.

He appreciated what his adoptive parents did for him even though he thought they were right wingers and racists. “I think they (my adopted parents) wanted somebody who would be a corporate thug of some sort, or perhaps a doctor or lawyer or something respectable,” Albee told the television interviewer Charlie Rose. “They didn’t want a writer on their hands. Good God, no.”

In his early 20s he had a chance encounter with the well-known writer, Thornton Wilder, at a lake in New Hampshire. As they drank bourbon, Albee said, “He kept throwing my poems gently on the water and when we finished, all of my poems were floating on the water. Wilder said I’ve read all of these poems. Yeah, I said, I can see them. Wilder said, Have you thought about writing plays?”  – New York Times video, The Last Word

Ten years later his first play, a one act, called The Zoo Story, opened in Berlin after it was rejected by New York theaters because of its violent ending.

“The Berlin production…was well-received. But in New York the play was rejected several times before the Actors Studio agreed to stage a single performance; afterward, Norman Mailer, who was in the audience, declared it “the best one-act play I’ve ever seen.”  – New York Times Obituary

When The Zoo Story opened for a commercial run at the Provincetown Playhouse in January 1960, reviews were mixed. Yet this play opened Albee’s eyes, and a star was born.

“For the first time in my life when I wrote that play, I realized I had written something that wasn’t bad,” he said. “You know, Edward, this is pretty good. This is talented. Maybe you’re a playwright.” So, I thought, ‘Let’s find out what happens.”

Albee’s most famous play and one of his two Tony Award winners, Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? had a strange title which confused many people.

“There was a saloon…on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place …back in about 1953… I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf ? means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, who’s … afraid of living life without false illusions? And it did strike me as being a rather typical university, intellectual joke.”– New York Times Obituary

The 1966 film adaptation was directed by Mike Nichols. The film won many Oscars including Best Actress for Elizabeth Taylor but none for Albee who wasn’t even asked to write the screenplay. However, the movie made Albee and the play known around the world.

He ended up winning three Pulitzer Prizes, two Tonys and several others, while writing plays that challenged critics and audiences. “If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a drama critic,” Albee said in 1988.

“Maybe I’m a European playwright and I don’t know it,” Albee said in an interview with The Times in 1991, adding, “Just look at the playwrights who are not performed on Broadway now: Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet. Not a one of them.” – New York Times Obituary

Albee continued working and received another Tony for his 2002 production of The Goat. In 1994 he won a Pulitzer Prize for a play about his adoptive mother called Three Tall Women. He also won Pulitzers for Seascape and A Delicate Balance.

“I’ve been very open about my life. I have no secrets. Everybody knows that I am gay. Everybody knows that for 20 years I drank too much. Everybody knows I have something of a reputation of being a little difficult.”

“I can think of nothing worse than getting to the end of your life and figuring out you haven’t participated in it.” – Edward Albee, New York Times video, The Last Word