Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 27, 2000

Volume 29, Number 8

Edward Albee

Albee to hold 'conversation' with audience

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee will present the Maynard Mack Lecture at 5:15 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 2, in the University Theatre, 222 York St.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take the form of a "conversation," first with the moderator, Murray Biggs, associate professor of English and theater studies, and then with members of the audience.

Over the past 50 years, Albee has written 25 plays. He first gained critical attention in 1959 with "The Zoo Story" and is perhaps best known for "Who's Afraid of Virgnia Woolf?" which was staged in 1962 and made into a film in 1966. His other works include "The Sandbox," "The American Dream," "Tiny Alice," "A Delicate Balance," "Box and Quotations," "All Over," "Ballad of the Sad Café" and "Three Tall Women."

The playwright has been described as the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill, and is credited with giving birth to American absurdist drama. The citation for his 1996 Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award notes: "Edward Albee burst onto the American theatrical scene in the late 1950s with a variety of plays that detailed the agonies and disillusionment of that decade and the transition from the placid Eisenhower years to the turbulent 1960s. Albee's plays, with their intensity, their grappling with modern themes, and their experiments in form, startled critics and audiences alike while changing the landscape of American drama."

Albee has described his dramas as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

The dramatist has won numerous awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes ("A Delicate Balance," "Seascape" and "Three Tall Women") and two Tony Awards ("Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "A Delicate Balance"). He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1985 and received a National Medal of the Arts in 1996.

The Maynard Mack Lecture honors the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English, who is also a former chair of the department. It is endowed through Yale's Elizabethan Club.

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

Yale kicks off 300^th birthday

Science Hill was a popular spot during Yale's open house

Museums welcome the public at behind-the-scene tours

The sweet and savory tale of a 300-pound cake

Peabody Museum opening Hall of Native American Cultures

New Republic editor describes his political coming-of-age

The new Gilder Boathouse is dedicated at a ceremony

Comedian Bill Cosby to perform as a benefit for L.E.A.P.

Albee to hold 'conversation' with audience

Study equates early life stress, drug addiction

NIH grant supports study of amphibians' deformities

Cancer center will lead community initiative to bridge 'digital divide'

Teasing about looks may play a role in binge eating, study finds

Symposium will explore the claim that there is an 'intelligent design' to the universe

Lecture celebrates new Robert W. Winner Professorship

Books take look at African American stage performers

Book explores conceptions of harems in art, literature

Works by Kosovo refugee on view at Physicians Building

Symposium will explore 'the portrait in American art'

DMCA presents debuts of 'Convergence' and 'Ankle-Diver'

Yale singers will present excerpts of famous opera scenes over two nights

Music festival sponsoring Carnegie Hall concert

Opening Yale 300: Images from the Celebration

In the News

Yale Scoreboard