Editors' Introduction

Editors’ Introduction David A. Crespy and Lincoln Konkle 1 Edward Albee as Dramatic Innovator Thinking of the major American playwrights of the twentieth century— Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, August Wilson—each forms a gestalt based upon their most famous plays. Rather than remembering O’Neill’s experiments with style and subject matter from the twenties and thir- ties, we think of The Iceman Cometh, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten—all realistic and autobiographical. Williams is most lauded for The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the finest examples of his poetic realism. Miller has his famous four plays depicting individuals who are destroyed by society’s values: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge. August Wilson wrote a play about the African-American experience for each decade of the century, the best known of which are Fences and The Piano Lesson. The point is that the cited examples of each playwright are of a piece. Their dramatic and theatrical similarities, along with subject matter and theme, make them easily identifiable as a play by the particular playwright. However, if one tried to think of a gestalt for Edward Albee, it would prob- ably have to be based only on his masterpiece: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Thinking of his other famous and award-winning plays, they are not of a piece, either theatrically or dramatically. To illustrate: A young man who lives in a run-down New York tenement virtually hypnotizes an upper-middle class family man reading on a bench in Central Park. After the young man fascinates the other about his attempt to befriend a dog, his conversation with the older man leads to a suicide but also an authen- tic connection between two strangers. (The Zoo Story). An old woman is buried in a children’s sandbox on a beach. Her family, a wealthy couple who have paid to do things right, listen to a cellist playing as the moment of death approaches though all the while the old woman has been complaining to the audience. After the couple departs, a young man do- ing calisthenics becomes the Angel of Death, silencing the old woman. (The Sandbox). A middle-aged couple returns home from a faculty party at a New England college and proceeds to throw a drunken impromptu party for a young couple new to the college. Rather than polite party games, they play vicious highly © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:�0.��63/97890043947��_00� <UN> 2 Crespy and Konkle personal games perhaps with life-changing consequences for all of them. (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). A retired couple debates what to do with the rest of their lives as they picnic on a beach. By the end of the first act a pair of human-sized lizards approach them. In Act Two the lizards, who can talk, compare life under the sea to life on land, decide to return to their home, but the retired couple persuades them to stay. (Seascape). An elderly widow in poor health is attended to by her middle-aged, hired caretaker and a young lawyer from the firm that manages her wealth. Between cries of pain from an injury from her most recent fall and rushed trips to the bathroom, the woman shares memories of her ninety years of life. At the end of the act, she suffers a stroke. Act Two presents the same three actresses but now playing the elderly woman at three stages of her life: her twenties, fifties, and nineties. The end of the play suggests the end of her life, perhaps with an integration of her younger selves. (Three Tall Women). A highly successful Manhattan architect reveals to his best friend that he has been having an affair with a goat. The friend’s revelation of this secret to the architect’s wife causes a terrible fight among the couple and their gay son, and the play ends with the revelation of an act of revenge: the wife drags the slain goat into their living room. (The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?). These short and full-length plays are too varied in character, situation, or theatrical style to easily form a type that might be called “the Albee play.” One might counter that a full listing of his plays would show Albee’s com- monalties (e.g., upper-class middle-aged couples) as with any of the other playwrights, but a comprehensive review of his plays would also show a range of other types of characters. Think of Tiny Alice: a Cardinal of the Church, a lay-priest, a wealthy woman, a lawyer, and a butler (it sounds like the start of a walk-into-a-bar joke). Or Box and Quotations from Chair Mao Tse-ung: a disembodied voice, the former head of the Chinese Communist party, a long- winded lady, a silent minister, and an old woman. Listening has no married couples, just a psychiatrist, her former lover, and her female patient. The Play About The Baby brings together a young couple who have just had their first child and an older man and woman though they do not seem to be a couple. In Fragments, characters are identified only by gender and age and none of them is a couple. And think of the variation of theatrical style in the famous plays summa- rized above: from a minimalist realism (The Zoo Story), to fourth-wall break- ing metatheatre (The Sandbox), to nearly kitchen sink-realism in a living room (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), to fairy tale symbolism (Seascape), to the expressionistic splitting of a character into three selves (Three Tall Women), <UN>.

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