chapter 5 “Coming Back a Short Distance Correctly”: Albee’s Absurdist Adventures in Berlin, Moscow, and Vienna
David A. Crespy
Abstract
Edward Albee’s linkage to the Theatre of the Absurd is tied to three historic European journeys. These include Albee’s 1959 journey to Berlin for the very first production of his work, The Zoo Story, paired with a Samuel Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape, at the height of the Cold War. The second was Albee’s extraordinary foray into the heart of the Soviet Union with John and Elaine Steinbeck in 1963, leading to a lifelong commit- ment to the free expression of writers. Adding a coda to these early European travels, Albee’s partnership in the 1990s with Vienna’s English Theatre, led to Albee’s successful direction of his Three Tall Women, his third Pulitzer, and a resurrection in acclaim with the American theatre. With these three journeys—to Berlin, Russia, and Vienna— Albee took, to borrow an analogy from his play The Zoo Story, a long, somewhat absurd, European expedition to the avant-garde to come back the short distance of American theatre correctly.
There is a simple factual connection between Edward Albee and the theatre of the absurd, and it is not just that Martin Esslin provides this connection in his eponymous book on the subject or what countless others have discussed and disputed in recent years with regard to the absurd, or the form that Michael Y. Bennett rightly terms “parabolic drama.”1 I suggest that connection is also tied to three historic European journeys made by the Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist at three significant points in his career—and to my mind, it is as much these specific journeys as the critical discourse around his plays that provide Albee with his absurdist linkage. I believe that these journeys not only opened the way for Albee’s own success as major international playwright, but also opened the American theatre landscape to a whole new world of playwrit- ing techniques pioneered by Albee’s European predecessors.
1 Michael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.
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Albee’s journey to commercial and critical success as an American play- wright began in 1959, absurdly enough (if I may use the word in the non- theatrical sense), in Berlin, with the very first production of his work, The Zoo Story, paired with a Samuel Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape, in the height of the Cold War, in German, a language he understood not at all. That was the first and perhaps the indelible connection that linked Albee and Beckett at the outset of the younger author’s career. Albee’s journey in Europe was continued in a sense in September 1963, at the height of his career, not long after the suc- cessful run of his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway and just after the opening of his important adaptation of Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café, also on Broadway, with Albee’s extraordinary foray into the heart of the Soviet Union with John and Elaine Steinbeck, and was ended by the as- sassination of John F. Kennedy. And here, the darkness of the Cold War and the oppression of Eastern bloc writers added another, more personal connection between Albee and his fellow European experimentalists. Adding a coda to these early European travels, Albee’s close friendship with Franz Schafranek, the artistic director of Vienna’s distinguished English Theatre, led to an ongoing directing project for Albee; at this distinguished Austrian theatre, Albee directed not just his own work but also the work of Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Lanford Wilson. And by the time this third European experience happened, American theatre had forgotten Albee, and he had been consigned to the back-roads of regional theater. Yet this last Euro- pean foray culminated in Albee’s successful direction of his Three Tall Women, which brought Albee his third Pulitzer prize in drama—and a resurrection in acclaim first with European and then with American theatre critics and au- diences. To me, these three journeys—to Berlin, Russia, and Vienna—get at what truly thrust Albee into the continent of the Theatre of the Absurd—he took, to borrow an analogy from his own play The Zoo Story, a long, somewhat absurd, European expedition to the avant-garde to come back the short dis- tance to American theatre correctly. And it changed the nature of playwriting in America. i Albee, the Absurdist?: An Appropriate Label?
It has been a matter of course to think about Edward Albee as one of the major absurdist playwrights who erupted in the late 1950s from the existentialist re- sponse to World War ii. However, Martin Esslin, the author of the seminal text, The Theatre of the Absurd, didn’t think that America was sufficiently drained of “the sense of meaning and purpose in life, which has been characteristic