Edward Albee: A Singular Journey--A Biography (review)

Abstract

During the 1960s, no American playwright attracted more popular and critical attention than Edward Albee. At once drawn to and at times offended by such early plays as The Zoo Story and The American Dream, audiences conferred "major" status [End Page 98] upon the playwright after his first Broadway production in 1962, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Although he was (and, in spirit, remains) a decidedly off-Broadway dramatist, Albee found himself at the center of the contemporary American theatrical world. The success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? brought with it a feature on the cover of Newsweek and excoriating critical assault and shrill overpraise. After a first decade and a half of excellent work (1960-75), Albee entered a fifteen-year period (1975-90) in which his plays became increasingly obscure and theatrically suspect, despite the success of Seascape (1975). However, with Three Tall Women, which first premiered in 1991 in Vienna and went on to earn the playwright his third Pulitzer Prize in 1994, Albee reemerged, not as the angry young playwright of years ago, but, now in his seventies, as an elder statesman of American theater. For many, Mel Gussow suggests in Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, the playwright stands as "the outstanding imaginative dramatist of his generation" (404). Albee clearly has inscribed himself into the cultural history of the American theater, and Gussow has admirably succeeded in charting the uneven trajectory of Albee's private life and public accomplishments.