Conversations With Edward Albee

by Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin

The influential American playwright discusses his work, the nature of art, the role of the unconscious, American culture, and the theater

Genres: Nonfiction

223 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1986

About the author

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.

People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.

Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Reviews

[Robert Zaslavsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is as revealing as one can expect a writer's conversational disclosures to be. All those who think that a play can be understood only through performance should pay special attention to Albee's prescriptions that the only way to understand a play truly is to read the text and create in one's own mind a performance as close to the ideal performance that the playwright had in mind when writing the play.