Sitting down with Edward Albee for a chat was as stimulating, provocative and entertaining as experiencing one of the many plays which made him one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. While some his works were bafflingly opaque and dense, the writer himself was eminently accessible, articulate, witty and, always, always, brutally honest.(Albee died on September 16 at his New York home aged 88 years old.)The first time I happened to interview him was in his art-crammed loft in Tribeca on the occasion of the opening of “Three Tall Women,” the 1994 off-Broadway hit which would bring him back from a long exile as a whipping boy for the critics. He had, of course, blazed onto the scene more than three decades earlier with 1959’s off-Broadway drama, “Zoo Story,” and had established himself as the enfant terrible of the theater three years later with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” That wickedly funny and mordant view of a corrosive marriage catapulted him onto the front ranks of American dramatists, picking up the mantle of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, which he in turn would pass on to the likes of David Mamet and Tony Kushner.When “Three Tall Women” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize - his third after “A Delicate Balance” (1967) and “Seascape” (1972) - he refused to acknowledge that it represented any sort of a comeback. “Of course, I’m surprised and delighted. But then I’m surprised when I don’t win awards, too,” he said at the time with a sly smile. “Every artist has many lives and deaths and you really can’t afford to think too much about it. There’s never been much of a link between quality and popular acceptance, so you just keep on doing it on the assumption you’re doing good work.”That assumption was challenged not only by the brutality of the critics but also by audiences who were often befuddled and angered by his plays - to his satisfaction. Indeed, with the exception of “Virginia Woolf,” and “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”, none of his plays presented on Broadway lasted more than five months and most of them not much more than a couple of weeks. His 1982 Broadway play, “The Man Who Had Three Arms,” (1983) lasted only sixteen performances on the heels of the flops of “The Lady from Dubuque” and his adaptation of Nabokov’s “Lolita.” “It is a temper tantrum in two acts,” Frank Rich in the New York Times, wrote of “Three Arms,” damning the playwright’s “atrophied talent.”However wounded Albee was - and how could he not be - he refused to compromise his artistic vision. “Yeah, I want to reach as wide an audience as possible but, alas, on my own terms. I don’t want to… oversimplify just to give myself the illusion of accomplishment. You start lying, telling half-truths, well, what’s the point? Ascribe it to my arrogance - an arrogance that any artist in the United States has got to have to survive- but I can’t really approach my work in any other way.”Albee spent his years out of favor developing plays and directing productions in Europe and teaching at the University of Houston. Much of his work was a dissection of the bourgeois values he’d observed - and learned to detest - as the adopted son of Reed and Frances Albee. Growing up amid social standing, affluence and privilege only served to sharpen his rebellion to the point that his mother repeatedly told him, “I’m sorry I ever adopted you.” In applying a lacerating truthfulness to what he considered his mother’s phony values, Albee was a soul mate to his contemporary artist, Stephen Sondheim, whose socialite mother Janet, had said much the same to him. “The only regret I have is giving you birth,” she had written to the uncompromisingly honest composer.It was somewhat ironic then that Albee’s return to public favor should come with the acclaimed “Three Tall Women,” a rumination of regret and bitterness in the three stages in the life of a woman based on Frances Albee. “She was destructive and contemptible but there were reasons for her behavior as there always are,” he said. “Writing the play allowed me to understand her better, though I’m not sure I liked her any more or less than I already did.”As much as Albee was considered chiefly as a writer of domestic drama, he passionately insisted that all of his work was “very, very political.” When his 1967 play “A Delicate Balance” was revived in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, he changed one line: “Our dear Republicans, dull as ever” morphed into “Our dear Republicans, brutal as ever.”Albee said at the time, “My plays are all about how we choose to live our lives, the avoidances, the compromises, and that all affects how we vote, how we think about ourselves in a participatory, evolving revolutionary democracy. I think we’re in very serious trouble as a country through our passivity and our greed, and our fear of not being controlled… I hope I’m subversive. I hope I can still do a little useful damage.”As bleak and lacerating as his work could be, Albee himself could display a reticent charm and, even, playfulness. Along with his heroes Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, he expressed admiration for humorist James Thurber, puppeteer Burr Tillstrom (“Kukla, Fran & Ollie”) and the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. And, despite his savage view of marriage, he had long time relationships with playwright Terrence McNally and sculptor Jonathan Thomas.“I’m not against marriage,” he said. “I’ve only railed against people continuing in a relationship beyond its usefulness and continuing in it dishonestly. It’s the misuse and self-delusion that bothers me.”In one of my last interviews with Albee, I asked him whether he entertained any delusions about himself. He smiled and replied, “Oh, that I’m going to live forever, I guess. But I don’t spend much time thinking about my dying. I’m so disapproving of death. It’s such a waste of time.’
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