| Though
he describes playwriting as "a tough racket" and discourages all but the most dedicated of young people from
entering the field, Edward Albee has managed to become one of America's greatest living dramatists. At age seventy-three, he shows no signs
of slowing down.
This month will mark the world-premieres of two new
Albee plays, "The Play About the
Baby" and "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" opening within days of each other in New York. Refusing to be left
out of the Albee frenzy, the Princeton theater
scene has apparently made February its own unofficial
Albee month.
Though there will be no premieres, three of Albee's
plays from throughout his career are set to
open on campus in the coming weeks, and Albee
himself will give a public lecture tonight at 8 p.m. in McCosh 10.
First up is a revival of Albee's death-bed drama
"All Over" from the early seventies,
which opens next week at McCarter Theater under the direction
of Emily Mann. Set in the bedroom of a popular elderly gentleman
on the day of his death, "All Over" unfolds the layers of complicated relationships between the men and women
who loved him.
The nameless characters, who are referred to only
by their relationship to the non-speaking
dying man (e.g. The Wife, The Mistress, The Daughter),
ride an emotional roller-coaster through the play's two acts as they confront the reality of mortality and the
nature of human connection.
Despite the ups and downs of "All Over,"
Albee claims that it, like "every one of
my plays, is an act of optimism, because I make the assumption that it is possible to communicate with other
people."
As he tends to do for major stagings of his works,
be they revivals or premieres, Albee has
involved himself substantially in the production process
at McCarter. He has worked with Mann throughout the various phases
from casting to rehearsals. While Mann has never before directed Albee's work, several of the lead actors, including
the widely acclaimed Rosemary Harris, have
collaborated on past productions with Albee.
Though for him the complete experience of a play
comes while writing it, Albee does enjoy
having his work produced "so that I can corrupt people,"
he says with tongue firmly in cheek.
Despite the importance of audience appeal for
producers in the shows that they back,
"You can't become an employee," cautions Albee. "You have to write what you think you have in your
head," he insists, refusing to allow the
public's response to his work, both critically and financially, to influence his writing.
Through a career that has spanned five decades,
Albee has seen his favor with the audiences
and critics come and go. But his strategy of writing for himself
"because I have to" instead of "to make people comfortable" has propelled him to three Pulitzer prizes for drama,
each in a different decade. "You have to
go on the assumption you're doing good work and go
on doing it," he said.
This tension between the audience and the author
will be one of many subjects touched on in
Albee's public lecture tonight. Part of the J. Edward
Farnum lecture series, Albee's talk, titled "The Playwright versus the Theater," will address the state of
American theater from his perspective of
almost forty-five years of direct involvement.
Albee points without hesitation to the education of
a younger audience as the most important change that needs to occur for American theater
to flourish. "It starts in school. I went to Choate, Lawrenceville, private schools .
. . so I was informed about all the arts when I was very young." By educating
students about theater from a young age, Albee hopes that future audiences will "much
prefer Sophocles to the musicals that are infesting our theaters now."
Students at Princeton will also have their go at
two of Albee's early one act plays, "The American Dream" and "The Zoo
Story," which will be presented together at Theatre~Intime later this month. This
follows on the heels of Intime's production last season of another Albee masterpiece,
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
With all the activity, both here and in New York,
February will be a busy month for Albee. But March brings little relief, as he will head
to Texas to teach his annual course on playwriting, in the hopes that "maybe I can
persuade the right people to become playwrights."
And when he finally has a chance to catch his
breath this summer, what will Albee do to recharge his batteries? "I'll probably
write a play." |