Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 10, 2000Volume 29, Number 10



Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee answered questions from Professor Murray Biggs (right) and members of the audience with the wry humor that characterizes many of his plays.



Albee applauds 'dangerous' dramas

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee doesn't like "plays that just lie there and want to be commercially successful."

During his Nov. 2 talk on campus, Albee said that when he reads the scripts submitted by students who want to enroll in his playwrighting workshop at the University of Houston, he looks for "plays that aren't interested in being neat and tidy; plays that break formal conventions; [plays by authors who] think that every time a play is written, the whole concept of the nature of drama should be reexamined and rewritten; plays that are dangerous, that may perhaps have some social usefulness."

Murray Biggs, associate professor of English and theater studies, who moderated the "conversation" with Albee in the University Theatre, said in response, "That serves as a wonderful definition of your own work."

Albee came to Yale as the 11th annual Maynard Mack Lecturer. Best known for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" which played on Broadway and was made into a movie, Albee has written over a dozen plays, including Theater of the Absurd dramas such as "The Zoo Story," "The Sandbox," "The American Dream" and "Tiny Alice." He won the Pulitzer Prize three times (for "A Delicate Balance," "Seascape" and "Three Tall Women"), and the Tony Award twice (for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "A Delicate Balance").

Just as Albee's plays are often funny, so were his answers to the questions put to him by Biggs and members of the audience.

He described his first attempts to be a writer. "I began writing poetry at age 8. I wrote poetry for 20 years, and I got better. Most of the poems that I wrote when I was 28 were better than most of the poems that I wrote when I was 8 -- most of them, but not all. But I never felt like a poet. I felt like somebody who was writing poetry. There's a big distinction: You can feel like a poet and still be lousy, but if you don't even feel like a poet ...," he trailed off, and the rest of the sentence was drowned in laughter.

Albee wrote two novels, at ages 14 and 16. "I hope nobody will ever write novels as dreadful as they were," he quipped, adding, "I attempted the short story, along the way, discovering that the short story and I had a great disagreement about its nature. I came to the conclusion that the short story was right."

His first play was a three-act sex farce, written when he was 12, about which, "the less said, the better, since my knowledge of both farce and sex was minimal at the time," he noted.

After graduating from Choate high school in Wallingford, he entered Trinity College in Hartford. "I got thrown out of college in the middle of my sophomore year," said Albee, "and moved to Greenwich Village, where I started educating myself." He described the Village in the 1940s and 1950s as "a hotbed of creativity."

Around that time, Albee became estranged from his well-to-do adoptive family, who objected to "my not getting educated, my living in Greenwich Village and being a writer, when I was supposed to do something totally different, like be a Republican, perhaps," he joked.

After about 10 years of false starts, Albee recalled, he sat down at the massive, ancient typewriter that he had "liberated from the Western Union Company" where he worked, and banged out "The Zoo Story" in about three weeks. "And all of a sudden, my entire life changed," he said.

Albee was 30 when he wrote "The Zoo Story." Now, at 72, he's still going strong, both writing and directing. His most recent play, just finished and not yet staged, is "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?"

Asked if he is interested in writing screenplays, Albee said, "Life is too short." He went on to explain: "If you're a playwright, you get rather spoiled by the fact that you have control over the script. Nobody can make a change in it without your permission, and any change that you allow to be made, you own. You have casting approval, and all the rest. When you write a screenplay, even if they buy a play of yours to make a movie out of, and you write the screenplay, you don't own the screenplay that you write. You are an employee. You don't own the copyright. You can be fired from your own screenplay, and they can bring other writers in to rewrite your work completely. ...

"I'm a word man. ... A play of mine has to be heard more than seen, and film is fundamentally a visual medium. ... What is heard is basically incidental to the effectiveness of the film. I don't know if I'd be any good as a screenplay writer. But given that all the screenplay writer's judgments can be superseded by the actors and director, I just don't want to get involved. Life is too short. Plus, I'd probably be lousy at it."

On the other hand, he acknowledged that movies have the advantage of reaching vastly larger audiences than staged plays.

"As playwrights, you want to reach as many people as you possibly can. You want to corrupt as many people, as quickly as you can. If you write a play, and it becomes an economically, commercially successful film, it's going to be seen by a few hundred million people. How long would a play have to run to be seen by that many people? A very, very long time. Centuries perhaps."

Writing plays led Albee to directing them. "I figured out, very early on, that nobody really knows as much what a play should sound like and what it should look like as the author who wrote it. I started observing directors who were directing my work ..."

He made his directorial debut at a theater "deep in the foothills of Pennsylvania" which was staging "The Zoo Story."

"It was, without question, the worst production of any play of mine I have ever seen -- including two in Lubbock, Texas, where the acting school there taught people that acting was to stand with your fingers clenched, and when it's your turn to speak, take two steps forward, close your eyes, speak out, and then move back," said the playwright. "It occurred to me that there was more craft to directing than I knew. So I spent more time observing what other people did. ... Eventually I had the confidence to try it again."

Albee has since directed several of his own plays as well as works by Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepherd and Lanford Wilson. "I'm not a bad director," he admitted. As an added advantage, "I learn a great deal about playwrighting by directing other people's plays,"he said.

Noting that Albee once described his drama "The American Dream" as an attack on "the substitution of artificial for real values in our society," Biggs asked, "Has it really helped to change our priorities?"

Albee answered with a hint of resignation: "Art changes nothing. Art just makes the people who create art happy, I'm more and more convinced. ... We all write things in the hope that people will pay a lot of attention to what we're saying, that you can hold the mirror up to people and say, 'Look! this is the way you behave. If you don't like it, why don't you stop it?' But people pay no attention. They go on behaving exactly the way they did."

And then he added, with a mischievous smile, "Which is why they keep on doing our plays. They're still useful, because nobody pays any attention."


T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

$5 million will fund hypoglycemia study

Peabody to launch program on biodiversity and human health

Albee applauds 'dangerous' dramas

Trio of sisters harmonizing at School of Music

Yale College Dean's Office announces new staff


ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS

Scientists from Yale, China enter new partnership

Tufte will talk about design 'In the Company of Scholars'

Gordon Grand Fellowship hosts visit by marketing expert


MEDICAL SCHOOL NEWS

Globalization brings ethical responsibilities, philosopher says

Exhibit illustrates the connections between Yale, the rail and sports

Junior faculty members will pursue research on fellowships

Yale licenses researchers' new technology for screening ion-channel drugs

The custom of arming slaves to be explored in major conference

Oscar-winning alumna

Possession by dybbuk to be explored in Slifka talk

Scholar is honored for linking biblical stories with ancient societies' social ecology

Linda Schwartz honored for her 'selfless service' on behalf of veterans

Concerts will feature early sacred music

Remington to discuss new book on Darwin

Splendor on the Grass

In the News

Yale Scoreboard



Bulletin Home|Visiting on Campus| Calendar of Events|Bulletin Board

Classified Ads|Search Archives|Production Schedule|Bulletin Staff

Public Affairs Home|News Releases| E-Mail Us|Yale Home Page