| Getting
Albee's 'Goat' is delicate balance By
Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY |
NEW
YORK — Ask Edward Albee no questions and he'll give you no lip. "Don't
tell me what you're going to ask me," the playwright suddenly snaps, interrupting a
guest at his vast Tribeca loft as she begins setting up a query." Surprise me —
or I'll be able to rehearse my answers." It's
hard to tell whether Albee is being playful, condescending or just willfully contrary.
Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has cultivated a reputation for dramatic
statements that defy simple categorization. Plays such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance and Three Tall Women have mixed naturalism with the
abstract and absurd, examining human frailty and yearning with a darkly elegant wit that
has earned him two Tony Awards and a pair of Pulitzer Prizes. Though
he will celebrate his 74th birthday in March, Albee apparently remains as prolific, and as
much in demand, as ever. Following the New York debut of his The Play About the Baby last
year, Albee will stage two premieres here over the next month. The Goat or Who Is Sylvia
began previews at Broadway's John Golden Theatre on Saturday and opens thereon March 10,
and The Occupant is also scheduled to open in March at the Peter Norton Space
off-Broadway. In addition, a revival of Albee's 1971play All Over opened Friday at the
McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., where it will run through March 3. All
three productions feature noted stage and screen actors. Anne Bancroft stars in Occupant,
a portrait of the controversial sculptor Louise Nevelson, a longtime friend of Albee's who
he says "managed to invent herself, going through years of hopelessness and rejection
and changing from this immigrant — a Jewish girl from Russia — to this great
American sculptor, this extraordinary personality." Albee
is less forthcoming about the fictional couple played by Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl
in Goat, a study of a family in crisis. And when asked to reflect on All Over — in
which Rosemary Harris and Michael Learned respectively play the wife and mistress of a
dying man, whose powerful impact on his family and friends is explored — Albee simply
shrugs. "That play was written 31 years ago. Ask any creative person — they
don't retain completely where they got their ideas from 31 years ago. Who does?" One
idea that Albee will deign to discuss is the popular notion that his plays — with
their depictions of volatile family life, references to alcohol abuse and images of
isolation and abandonment — draw primarily from personal experience. "You get
your ideas from all sorts of places — people you've known, people you've seen,
yourself. "But
most importantly, you get them from what you invent, from your mind," he argues. Though
Albee has earned particular praise for the strong, three-dimensional female roles in his
plays, he writes them with no special requirements in mind. Referring to David Mamet,
whose plays are famously male-dominated, the openly gay Albee quips, "He's been
married twice, and he probably spends more time with women than I do. But David's concerns
are obviously less with women than with men — though I don't know that that's a
failure on his part. My concerns are equally with men and women." The
actresses cast in the aforementioned productions certainly value Albee's psychologically
and emotionally rich portraits of women. "I think he invests his female characters
with as much of himself as any other characters in his plays," says Ruehl.
"These women are multifaceted, complete human beings. And they have this great
facility with language, because he is so precise and extraordinary in his use of
language." Adds
Harris, alluding to her character in All Over: "I don't know how a man can get inside
the mind of a woman who has been rejected by her husband for 20 or 30 years. How did
Shakespeare get into the minds of Juliet and Cleopatra? It's a mystery, isn't it?" Clearly,
Albee has little interest in explaining his mysterious creative process to outsiders. But
the results continue to generate interest. Plans for later this year include a
presentation of Albee's Seascape at Hartford Stage in June, and possibly an off-Broadway
production of 1995's The Lorca Play in December. "And
I've got a play inside my head that I want to find some time to write," Albee
announces. Predictably, he's not sharing any specific details. "Obviously, I have
ideas. But I think about them for a long time before I trust them to the page." |