“It’s a good view,” says Edward Albee. That’s an understatement. On the patio outside the summer house he bought 41 years ago for $40,000, the playwright squints in response to a sunny September day. A few hundred yards down the hill a torrent of Atlantic Ocean waves hammers the beach.
In 1961, Albee drove out for the first time to Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island, past Westhampton and Southampton and Bridgehampton, to meet with the actress Uta Hagen. Albee wanted to talk to her about his play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He remembers swooping up and down Old Montauk Highway.
“There was no ‘new’ highway yet,” he says. “There were very few houses out this way at all. Those great hills along the way . . . I thought: This is pretty good.
“So I took a chance. I called the sales agent out here, and said: Anything available on the ocean? Now these were the good old days, before anything cost anything. About six months later, we were in [`Virginia Woolf’] rehearsals, which were going well, and the agent called and said she had a house. I came out to look at it and thought this is it.” Utter certainty.
If only more in life were like that. “I wish it were,” he says, “although to me I have to say it usually is.” A visitor can’t help but wonder how the same sentence, coming from the same man at a younger, less peaceable age, would’ve sounded. From today’s Edward Albee, however, the one enjoying a sun-dappled third act at age 75, it sounds simply . . . certain.
Ever since Jerry cornered Peter on a Central Park bench in “The Zoo Story” and demanded an audience, Albee has, in the words of Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls, served as “an invaluable irritant to the status quo.” With “The Zoo Story” hitting off-Broadway in 1959 and, three years later, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Broadway, the American establishment had an unnerving new commentator wielding a venomously witty pen.
Albee was in, or It, for a good while. “Virginia Woolf?” started the royalties rolling, though his adoptive parents brought Edward up in wealth, if not in familial warmth. Then, by the late 1970s, Albee was out.
Since the success of “Three Tall Women” a decade ago, he has been in again.
“I kept right on writing steadily throughout dismaying aspects of my career,” he says. “And I don’t think the writing changed very much. I think maybe I’m getting better. I’d like to think that.”
The Goodman Theatre opens its Edward Albee Festival Tuesday with the first of two Chicago premieres, “The Play About the Baby” (1998). Artistic director Falls is staging Albee’s more recent play, “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?,” opening Oct. 6. Three separate programs of Albee one-acts complete the Goodman’s festival.
It’s all “very flattering, very pleasant,” he says. “Soon enough I’ll find out if they’re screwing up the plays, which I don’t think is too likely.”
On the Montauk house’s second floor, reached by a tiny, winding staircase just off the kitchen, Albee’s study affords another sublime ocean view, as well as a pleasantly lolling house cat. “Hello, Snow,” Albee says. Albee and his longtime companion, the Canadian-born artist and sculptor Jonathan Thomas, live with Snow, eight feral cats and a couple of raccoons that come around regularly.
The sun is shining, but as evidenced by Albee’s plays, written by our most probing chronicler of the games people play in the name of love in all its bloody particulars, you never know when the clouds may roll in. After more than four months of chemotherapy, Thomas is dealing as best he can, Albee says, with cancer. He undergoes bladder surgery Oct. 8.
“Ugly business,” Albee says. “But we’re optimistic.”
Another view
A few minutes later, Albee says he has “another good view” to offer. Down the stairs, out the kitchen door, past the tennis court (“needs work,” he says), there it is: A distant swimming pool surrounded by beautifully landscaped grounds, dotted by sculpture. Beside the pool a man, the pool man, lies face down wearing a baseball cap. The scene is worthy of David Hockney. Yet in its mixture of serenity and underlying unease — the offstage Thomas remains a distinct presence — it is classic Edward Albee.
Like most major American playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams to Arthur Miller, Albee was heralded as a Broadway savior before falling out of favor with an audible thud. For Albee, things got especially rough in the 1980s, with the harsh New York reception for such plays as “The Man Who Had Three Arms” — a success in its pre-Broadway Goodman engagement — and a fraught adaptation of Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
Then he wrote “Three Tall Women,” an exquisite chamber piece inspired by his exasperating, waspish and, in Albee’s theatrical terms, rewardingly complex adoptive mother. For that he was awarded his third Pulitzer Prize (the first two for “A Delicate Balance” and, more controversially, the lizards-and-humans allegory “Seascape”). The play enjoyed a long off-Broadway run, as well as many productions beyond.
“The Play About the Baby” had a decent off-Broadway run, though its allusive brand of absurdist farce — it’s an Adam and Eve riff, about young parents who suffer a baffling loss amid the taunts of a mysterious older couple — split audiences right down the middle. Same for “The Goat,” a genuinely unnerving blend of high comedy and domestic tragedy, in which a successful 50-year-old architect’s domestic life is shattered when he falls in love with a barnyard animal.
The play won the Tony Award and is due in London this winter. Albee retains tight contractual control over matters of actor, director and design approval. Falls, whose idea it was to salute Albee at the Goodman, says the playwright has been “quite involved” even though for various reasons, among them Thomas’ health, he didn’t travel to Chicago until this weekend.
Weeks ago the festival actors’ head shots and resumes were faxed to Albee either in Montauk, or in his capacious Manhattan loft. To the Goodman’s Steve Scott, who coordinates casting, Albee’s degree of control is “unique in my experience. He’s very concerned about people being the right type and age-appropriate. He’s very concerned with the whole process, and I think rightly so.
“He’s probably seen a lot of lousy productions of his plays.”
At the moment a half-finished one-act occupies Albee’s attention. It is “Home Life,” a prequel to “The Zoo Story,” in which Peter is seen at home with his wife, just before his fateful meeting with Jerry. The two plays will be staged at Hartford Stage next spring.
In 1959, “The Zoo Story” hit American theatrical life like “a shockwave,” according to Albee biographer Mel Gussow. (Gussow leads an Albee panel at the Goodman Oct. 27.) Its impact was akin to John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” three years earlier in England.
Dealing with disadvantaged
“Suddenly,” says Gussow on the phone from his desk at The New York Times, where he writes about culture, “playwrights and people who wanted to be playwrights realized they could deal with the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged. They didn’t have to got through the old Broadway routine to have themselves heard.” In the words of playwright John Guare, who along with Sam Shepard, David Mamet and others owes a large debt to Albee, ” a generation had a figurehead . . . Albee spawned an entire generation of park bench plays. Theater for years became littered with park benches.”
To many conservative tastes, Albee’s dissection of lost souls was too much to bear. The Pulitzer drama jury recommended “Virginia Woolf?” for the 1962 award but, in part due to Chicago Tribune editor W.D. Maxwell, a member of the Pulitzer board that year, Albee’s play about George, Martha, Nick and Honey thrown into a snake pit of their own devising, came up empty-handed. No play won that year. Albee’s effort was “filthy,” Maxwell said, as well as “bigoted,” presumably against academics without imaginary offspring.
“To think of how controversial that play was in its time,” Gussow chuckles. “And Maxwell hadn’t even seen it.”
Falls finds Albee’s sustained ability to challenge an audience heartening. “There’s something about `The Goat’ and especially `The Play About the Baby’ that are playful in ways you don’t expect. They’re short plays, but sharp, and in his absolute confidence in mixing comedy with tragedy, both appear to be the work of a much younger writer — yet they have the maturity and wisdom of an older man.”
In 1988, he began teaching playwriting at the University of Houston. “I may have gotten to the point where I’ve learned as much as I can about teaching. And I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate now.” Slight pause. “Now that I’m sort of back in favor these last few years.”
Albee, who writes in longhand before using an electric typewriter, doesn’t believe in multiple drafts. “I tell my students: Most people start writing things down too soon, so they have to revise and rethink. Keep the play in your head until you can’t wait any longer. And then write it down.”
Not long after buying his Montauk house, used mainly in the summer months, Albee purchased a barn a few miles away. He established a foundation called the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, named after Albee’s old mentor and onetime lover, a composer and critic as well as Albee’s partner in heavy drinking. (Albee has been dry for many years; his wilder days are discreetly but honestly covered in the Gussow biography.)
Each month of operation the barn hosts a new half-dozen painters, writers and composers selected by Albee. “I’ll show you the place,” he says, strolling toward his Subaru Forester parked above his house on Old Montauk Highway.
Built in the 1920s, the barn is a charmed and charming spot, outdoor shower and all. Sitting at a table outside the barn, Albee says it’s a way to support “the young and the non-famous, as well as older people who may have fallen on hard times.”
Returning to the subject of his partner’s upcoming cancer operation, he is forthright, but his voice softens.
“It’s a 10-hour operation,” Albee says, “involving removal of the bladder and construction of a new one out of portions of the intestinal tract. [Thomas] went through 18 weeks of chemotherapy to prepare for this.”
Years of ups and downs
They met in 1971. Their early years endured plenty of ups and downs. (“I’d be dead without him,” Albee once said, referring to his drinking days.)
“James Thurber, a very important writer, almost totally ignored these days, once said a very important thing: A good marriage does not make two people one. A good marriage makes two people two. No role playing, no dominant partner, no subservient partner, none of that stuff,” says Albee, flying in the face of so many of his major characters. “It’s got to be two people, especially in a gay relationship, but it should be true of them all. A relationship should last only if it’s better for both people.”
Meantime, he says, “I hope I’ll have enough sense that if I ever stop getting ideas, I’ll stop writing.” Across the three acts of his public life, enduring fame, infamy, calumny and a peculiarly American critical and popular renaissance, the playwright believes he has done all in all “a pretty good job of it. I don’t think I lie. I don’t think I compromise much.
“And,” he says, squinting once more into the sun, “I hope my work is useful.”
Check out Albee menagerie
In order of creation, the work on view at the Goodman Theatre’s Edward Albee Festival begins with a zoo and ends with a goat.
In between lies a wide, stylistic menagerie of theatrical animals. Opening officially this week, the festival — an eight-play affair plus two special events — encompasses six decades in the creative life of a major American playwright.
All events are at the Goodman, 170 N. Dearborn St. Phone 312-443-3800 for tickets and more information.
“The Play About the Baby,” through Nov. 2. “We’ve come to take the baby,” intones one of two narrators, alternately menacing and clownish, in Albee’s 1998 conundrum. The Adam and Eve stand-ins reveling in their Eden don’t know what hit them. Audiences may not, either. Pam MacKinnon directs.
“The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?” through Nov. 2. Goodman artistic director Robert Falls stages Albee’s latest, which won a Tony Award. It begins with long-married Martin and Stevie bantering like a couple of Noel Coward characters about Martin’s affair with a goat. Then the wife realizes her husband’s not kidding.
“The Zoo Story” and “The Death of Bessie Smith,” 7:30 p.m. Oct. 21, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 26 and 2 p.m. Nov. 1. These early Albee one-acts, staged by Lynn Bernatowicz and Chuck Smith, respectively, reveal an ambitious writer’s thematic range. And this was before he got around to disorienting everybody with things like “Tiny Alice.”
“Box,” “The Sandbox” and “Finding the Sun,” 7:30 p.m. Oct. 23, 2 p.m. Oct. 26 and 8 p.m. Nov. 1. Albee has long acknowledged his love of Samuel Beckett. The two writers share a musicality of language as well as a worldview that might be described as exuberant fatalism. Eric Rosen directs these short, little-seen works — all involving sand — that take audiences a long way from the living-room confines of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“Marriage Play,” 2 p.m. Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 29 and 2 p.m. Nov. 2. Breaking up is hard to do. In this short piece from Albee’s middle-late period, Jack and Gillian tally up the ravages of holy acrimony. Lou Contey directs.
“An Evening With Edward Albee,” 7 p.m. Oct. 20. Goodman artistic director Robert Falls talks with Albee about work, life and other matters. Free; reservations required.
“Acting Albee,” 7 p.m. Oct. 27. Albee biographer and longtime New York theater writer Mel Gussow moderates a panel featuring such Albee veterans as George Grizzard (from the original “Virginia Woolf” cast, as well as the splendid 1996 Broadway revival of “A Delicate Balance”) and Maureen Anderman.
— Michael Phillips
