About the playwright: Edward Albee

Edward Albee is one of the most enduring and influential American playwrights of the twentieth century.  Born in Washington in 1928 he was adopted at 18 days old and grew up in an affluent if emotionally chilly home with servants and an adoptive mother, Frances who was, according to Albee's biographer Mel Gussow, “imperious, demanding, and unloving.” Despite being thrown out of various private schools. Albee was writing from an early age.

He was 31 when his first play The Zoo Story was first produced in Berlin.  It shared the bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and seemed to herald the arrival of a new exponent of Absurdist theatre.  Other plays quickly followed; The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960), but it was in 1962 that Albee truly found himself universally hailed with his masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

He has been described as a classic dramatist, spoken of with the same respect as Tennesse Williams, Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller.  He has inspired playwrights like Sam Shephard and David Mamet and earned the respect and friendship of others such as Harold Pinter.  “There is a great sense of danger in Edward's work, and you never quite know what's going to happen next,” said Pinter.

During his life Albee has struggled with dangerous demons of his own.  Aware that he was gay from the age of 8, he suffered a lack of acceptance from his family, in particular his mother, and developed a self-destructive propensity for alcohol early in his life.  When the critics began to turn on him in the 1980s he retreated from Broadway and began teaching drama and directing his own plays.  He also established a foundation for promising artists near his second home in Montauk, Long Island. 

To date Albee has written 28 plays over 44 years, some of them feted as works of literary genius, others slated as vitriolic rants.  He has won Tony Awards and 3 Pullitzer prizes.  At his most successful, says Michael Billington, Albee “has the ability to say difficult things within an acceptable framework - he takes what looks like the marriage play, the family play, and then makes you realise that something unnerving is happening behind it all.” 

Edward Albee is still alive and at the age of 80 is apparently working on a sequel to The Zoo Story.  While his long term partner was undergoing treatment for cancer Albee remained stoical about life.  “Remember what Beckett said, 'I can't go on, I'll go on.'”