Edward Albee
Edward Albee
The play’s the thing to test the limits of tolerance.
By Jerry Tallmer
Two thousand miles west of Santiago, Chile – “two thousand miles from anything in any direction,” says Edward Albee, with just a touch of adventurer’s pride – there lies Easter Island, a dot in the South Pacific inhabited by very few living people along with some 900 giant stone sculptures 8 to 70 feet high. These huge impassive guardians were carved out of volcanic rock between (approximately) 1100 and 1650 a.d. “Two-thirds of the island is lava,” says playwright Albee informatively. “One of the most amazing places in the world. And those sculptures are fantastic.”
He can say this because, as he cools out in his Tribeca loft surrounded by other, smaller primitive sculptures cheek by jowl with modern paintings, he is just back from 10 days out of his life, by aircraft, to see the moai of Easter Island with his own eyes.
Ten thousand miles (New York-Easter Island-New York) just for a viewing?
“Sure.” Dry pause. “Because it’s there.”
Which is what George Leigh Mallory said when they asked him why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. That was March 1923. The next year Mallory died in the attempt.
Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, four-time Tony Award winner Edward Albee is 78 now and, unlike Mallory, still very much with us, having survived or outwitted deafness, an artery bypass, a closed ancient chapter of belligerent boozing, and the worst that an assortment of hostile or middlebrow or no-brow critics (myself among them) could throw at him over the years, particularly the fallow years – for him – of the 1980s.
And if Mallory was a man of daring, what is to be said of the Edward Albee who four years ago, at age 74 – forty years after shaking America nightmare-awake with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — came out with a drama (on Broadway! winning his fourth Tony!) in which the leading character, an articulate, sophisticated architect, falls in love with a goat he’s been discreetly humping rather than his own wife. A goat — that’s a couple of steps farther along than Virginia Woolf’s Hump the Hostess.
“I’ll tell you the story of the goat,” says Albee. “It’s complicated. I must have been thinking about the limits of tolerance, and I had in mind a doctor, around 50 years old, with maybe a gay son … No, no, that wasn’t it … This doctor had the problem that he wasn’t participating fully in the sorrow and pain of his patients, so he injected himself with AIDS virus.
“At the time I was doing something else, so I had to put that idea in storage. The next year a play came to Off-Broadway with that exact setup, so I had to throw mine away. Well, for many years I’d been teaching some parts of every year at the University of Houston – a faculty full of farm boys who’d won Nobel Prizes. I used to ask them: ‘What about the animals? Did you ever do any fucking with the livestock?’ And they’d say: ‘Sure!’ and tell me all about it. So there I had it.
“See, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is not about goat-fucking; it’s about the limits of tolerance” – limits beyond the reach of the architect’s wife and their close friends when the truth comes out. “You know what shocked me more than anything else?” says Albee. “The people who walked out of the theater when the son kisses his father. Yes, that great big mouth-to-mouth kiss. That was the limit of their [the walkouts’] tolerance,” says the playwright who, while keeping his own private life over the decades as private as possible, has never wanted for courage in defiant embattlement for gay rights (and many other rights).
Edward – we go back a bit, in fact to his breakout, The Zoo Story (Provincetown Playhouse, 1958), so you must allow me betimes to call him Edward – has more than once said, and says again here, as we kick it around:
“I’ve never been the kind of playwright who thinks ahead: ‘What do I do now?’ Every play informs me that it’s ready to be written. I suddenly get the sense of a scene or scenes; people interacting.”
In dreams? When you’re asleep?
“No, when awake, not asleep. As soon as I hit the pillow, I’m gone. The older I get, the less I remember my dreams. Then again” – Albee throws in pokerfaced – “the older I get, the less I remember anything.
“It’s a very slow process; sometimes two years. Then when I know the characters very well, I let them tell me the play. All this usually comes before I write anything down. Some people [i.e., playwrights] write it all out as they go along. But if you do that, what if you want to change anything?
“When I was writing Virginia Woolf I had this idea for Act III. I wrote it out in eight pages – for Act III – while I was writing Act I. Then when I got there, it was all wrong. I had to throw it away.”
Uta Hagen, the first and greatest Martha (to Arthur Hill’s George) of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, used to half-amusedly, half-bitterly remark, each time the press heralded her latest “comeback,” that she’d never been away. Edward Albee, born March 12, 1928, was effectively “away” (with unpopular or unremembered works) from circa 1975 (Seascape), as he was closing in on age 50, to his brilliant 1994 “comeback” with Three Tall Women, in which all three women – actresses Jordan Baker, Marian Seldes, Myra Carter – were incarnations at varying ages of his own real-life adoptive mother, Westchester richbitch Frances (Frankie) Albee. (He has never, so far as I know, sought out his biologic mother.)
Seascape had won him Pulitzer #2, Three Tall Women snared Pulitzer #3. Pulitzer #1, for A Delicate Balance (1966) might possibly have been perceived as recompense for the one he did not get in 1962 for Virginia Woolf when the starchy Pulitzer administrators overruled their own Pulitzer judges, leading two of those judges to quit in disgusted protest.
“Well, you know what happened,” Edward says. “After I wrote Virginia Woolf and didn’t write Virginia Woolf II, things started to go south.” [In showbizzy tones]: “ ‘Why is he writing this metaphysical shit? Why not Virginia Woolf again?’ ”
(The metaphysical shit notably included Tiny Alice, a play which even Sir John Gielgud, its star, was baffled by, much as Bert Lahr, the funny-man star of Broadway’s Waiting for Godot, had drawn a personal blank on that Beckett masterpiece.)
“Some of the reviewers” – Albee still talking – “were getting very personal and nasty. In all fairness, I had been shouting my mouth off about the critics. My plays were getting done in Europe” – where in fact, in Germany, The Zoo Story had first seen the light of day – “and I taught, and went about my business. You do what you have to do, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how well you’re writing. I knew I was writing well” – as one might say: I crossed the street – “and eventually, after about five years, it turned around again.”
A moment’s silence.
“Maybe it’ll diminish again. You can’t worry about it.”
One of the things Albee has said that people like to quote is: “I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing – and I plan to go on writing until I’m 90 or gaga – it will all equal itself out … You can’t involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response.”
The “90 or gaga” line is bounced toward Edward once again, here in his loft.
“I hope I can tell the difference,” he wryly mutters. Then: “Do you remember what they say Bernard Shaw did in his 90s? I hope it’s true. He reread one of his plays and couldn’t understand it. Rewrote it to simplify it, and then wanted to rewrite and simplify all his plays.”
Albee looks his interlocutor in the eyes, and with no further ado asks: “What’s your favorite Shaw play?”
I don’t know, Edward … maybe … Saint Joan? [Should have said Pygmalion.] Remember when the priest who was so avid to have Joan burned at the stake collapses in anguish at the actual sight?
Albee: “I saw a wonderful production of that play in, I think, Edinburgh. Joan Plowright was Joan – you know, the stocky kid. I remember a British soldier in it who peels and eats an onion.”
No, Edward, that’s Peer Gynt.
“Well, it was done in this show too. Peer Gynt – that’s an Ibsen play I like. But I don’t like much Ibsen. I know it’s an unfair judgment because people tell me how Ibsen suffers in translation, but I find him didactic and predictable. I just now saw in London a nice production of The Wild Duck, but I don’t like plays where every person wears a sign.”
Well, Edward, be that as it may, The Wild Duck speaks to something damned important: Truth kills. Or can kill, if recklessly applied.
“It depends,” says one of America’s foremost archaeologists of illusion and delusion. “Whose truth are you talking about?” Another Albee pause. “I’ve tried to stop using the word.”
Harold Clurman, director, author, critic, inspiration and conscience of the Group Theater of the 1930s and ’40s – the seismic Fervent Years of American acting and drama – put the whole art of theater into the title of another of his books: Lies Like Truth. For that matter, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is but the most heralded of Edward Albee’s savage efforts to slash through curtains of lies to some simulacrum of truth at the core. The curtain lifts, and who’s there but the poor pathetic Wizard booming away on his obsolete, broken-down loudspeaker system – rather like stumblefoot automaton George W. Bush glued to the teleprompter, come to think of it.
Albee, a recipient of Kennedy Center honors when Clinton was president, has refused to attend any Kennedy Center ceremonies under Bush. “The White House is my house,” says citizen Albee bitterly. “One doesn’t like some presidents; this is the first president I’ve despised.” Two beats. “What’s worse is the fucking passive American people. Remember what Adlai Stevenson said? In this country we can still have anything we want – but we’re going to end up with what we deserve.”
A whole yet-to-be-written Edward Albee play could find its template in the marriage of Harold Clurman to actress and acting teacher Stella Adler. The Stella Adler Studio of Acting, on New York City’s West 27th Street, is giving itself over, the first weekend of May 2006, to a three-day Harold Clurman Festival of the Arts. Edward Albee is prominent among the speakers and performers – John Guare, Horton Foote, Zoe Caldwell, Marian Seldes, Elaine Stritch, David Amram, Roy Scheider, and others.
To Albee, Clurman in The Nation magazine was “one of the few critics who taught me about my work; his praise and his objections were both reasonable.” Perhaps Edward will tell the following story, though probably not:
“One day Harold and I had been to something, I forget what, on the East Side. We were coming back together in a taxi, east to west, through Central Park – Harold in his black overcoat and cane and homburg. He started talking. ‘They’ve just told me at The Times,’ he said, ‘that they aren’t going to give me the job as critic.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Too old,’ Harold said. He was so sad. He let me hold his hand.”
Edward Albee, like Harold Pinter, like everybody now alive, owes a great debt, artistically and philosophically, to Samuel Beckett, but on this day Edward surprises the hell out of me by saying that Waiting for Godot “is not my favorite Beckett play.” Reading my face, he says: “I mean, Godot is a fine play, but I don’t think he had his craft completely under control yet.”
Does anybody ever, he’s asked.
“It’s all relative. I like the [bare, Spartan] last plays, where he says in twenty minutes what it took him two and a half hours to say in Godot. In one we did at the Century Center, A Piece of Monologue, this old guy, played by Brian Murray, comes down front, looks out a window, and says: ‘It’s out there in the dark vast.’ ”
Albee’s voice rises with excitement. “Heartbreaking! Breathtaking! Any other playwright would have said: ‘ … in the vast dark.’ Beckett says: ‘ in the dark vast.’ That’s the difference between a good playwright and a great playwright.”
Albee has worn hearing aids for some years, though not the tiny little invisible ones that he considers ridiculous. “I wear glasses; why not a hearing aid?”
In 2000, the year Marian Seldes and Brian Murray contributed so sparklingly to yet another Albee comeback with The Play About the Baby at the Century Center near Union Square, he had two stents put in to bypass a 95-percent blocked artery to his heart.
“I was feeling very tired, sluggish. No pain, but I knew something was wrong. When the doctor told me what needed to be done, I said: ‘I’m very busy right now. Can I do this in a couple of weeks?’ He said: ‘You probably won’t be around in a couple of weeks.’ I said: ‘Oh well, then, I’ll have it done tomorrow.’ ”
Albee has lived through the years with partners – he flatly calls them lovers – William Flanagan (a composer), Terrence McNally (the playwright), and others, but for all the years since 1971 the one and only was Canadian-born sculptor Jonathan Thomas, who died in May 2005 after a two-year battle with bladder cancer.
“That was tough,” says Edward. “I brought him home here from the hospital the last two weeks, with nurses up in his bedroom. I don’t think anybody should be allowed to die where they don’t want to.”
Two events in the early life of Edward Albee were signposts of a sort. In reverse chronological order, they are:
When he was 21 or 22 and visiting boyfriend Flanagan at the MacDowal Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Edward introduced himself to Thornton Wilder.
“I gave him some of my poems to read. He took me out to get me drunk. He said: ‘I think you should write plays.’ I think he wanted to save poetry from me. Seven years after that I started writing plays. I don’t think he liked them very much. He didn’t say anything to me about them.” Pregnant pause. “But Thornton Wilder did write one play” – and here, since I have always thought so too, caustic Edward takes my breath away – “the greatest of all American plays,” viz., Our Town. “A really tough, tough play,” says the creator of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “No Christmas card there.”
When he was 15 or so, and being thrown out of one school or another, up to and including Valley Forge Military Academy, Edward wrote a play called Aliqueen, which had nothing to do with prizefighting or transvestites but was, so far as he can remember, “about a bunch of rich people.” Aliqueen was the name of the maid in the play.
“I showed it to my adoptive mother, and I think she threw it away.” Pause. “My first critic.”
Nothing in Edward Albee’s career has been more potentially consequential, or more generous, than the Playwrights’ Unit he and producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder set up and ran in the 1960s, with shows by aspiring or developing playwrights given birth at the historic old Cherry Lane on Commerce Street and other Off-Broadway premises.
Praise Edward for that now, and he says: “Oh well, it was because I want to see good plays.” At its gala, this recent spring, the rehabilitated Cherry Lane gave Edward Albee a lifetime citation. “All too early,” says the 78-year-old. Then, touching his moustache, after another Edwardian pause: “Unless it’s a hint. I don’t know.”
But we do. Those Easter Island sculptures – might they not show up in a new Albee play one of these days?
“Most things do,” says the man who watched from the roof of his building as the Twin Towers came down, then packed a suitcase with scripts and medicines and walked 50 blocks uptown to Penn Station and the train to Montauk. “I didn’t want to write a quick superficial piece about my reaction. I thought I’d wait. I can wait. So I’m waiting.”
Easter Island. Twin Towers. That could be worth waiting for.
