‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

 

‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

Rufus Sewell, Christine Baranski, Susan Wokoma, Toby Jones and Harriet Walter share their unforgettable encounters with a theatrical giant

 

Edward Albee

5 Quotes by Edward Albee to Make You a Better Writer

The playwright of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf left us incredibly wise insight about writing

Brian Rowe

October 17, 2019

Edward Albee (1928–2016) was a world-renowned playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. His most famous work is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but he’s also well-known for The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and A Delicate Balance.

Remembering Edward Albee

Edward Albee

 Remembering Edward Albee

BY Adam Green

September 17, 2016

Long considered the greatest living American playwright, Edward Albee died on Friday, at 88, at his home in Montauk, New York, leaving behind a body of work marked by its surreal imagination, savage wit, sulfurous view of human relations, and unflinching gaze into the existential abyss. Neil Simon he was not, though he shared his more box office–friendly contemporary’s gift for putting odd couples into comic—in his case, blackly comic—situations: A mild-mannered publishing executive and a desperate loner have a fatal encounter on a park bench (Zoo Story, 1959); a married man falls in love with a barnyard animal (The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?, 2002); an anthropomorphized reptile couple meets a pair of their human counterparts on the beach and sinks into despair at the ways of landlubbers (Seascape, 1974). Albee’s most famous—and most commercially successful—play, which also involves two married couples and generous helpings of scorn, is, of course, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The title is a play on the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” from the 1933 Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs. The implied answer is: Everybody. And Albee’s plays depict the desperate lengths to which we go in order to avoid confronting the big, bad wolf huffing and puffing at the door of our flimsy houses and the terrible damage we do to each other in the process. Albee’s characters may contort themselves into pretzels of self-deception, but the playwright insists that we do not, and his work repeatedly pushes audiences to confront truths and navigate terrains that they might have preferred to leave unexplored.

Edward Albee in England, circa 1967

The Tender Side of Edward Albee

December 1, 2016

The playwright Edward Albee died in September, and the New York theater community is celebrating his life and work in an event open to the public at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, at the August Wilson Theater. Here, four people who crossed paths with this famously irascible writer recall him as a friend, a mentor and an inspiration.

Out of Print /Andrea Dunbar

Out of Print: Andrea Dunbar

Grillo

March 30, 2018

Andrea Dunbar’s 1977 *The Arbor* begins with this sparse but telling stage direction: “The GIRL was with her boyfriend. They were at his friend’s. She had known the BOY for ages but had only been going out with him for three months.”

Postscript / Edward Albee, 1928-2016

 

Edwar Albee

Postscript: Edward Albee, 1928-2016

Hilton Als
September 17, 2016

Writing that gets under your skin, in your bones, will play in your head and memory like nothing else. While painting, photography, and movies can come at you with a very particular force—an in-your-face power that, when done correctly, unearths hitherto unexamined or marginalized feelings—dramatic literature lives in your ear, and, when it’s truly great, shapes how you shape words yourself.

Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee died Friday after a short illness.

Photo by Jennifer S. Altman

Edward Albee, three-time Pulitzer-winning playwright and ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ author, dies at 88

MIKE BOEMH

September 17, 2016

Edward Albee, the award-winning playwright who instilled fire-breathing life into George and Martha, the middle-aged couple who made his “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a clenched battleground of love-hate matrimony, has died. He was 88.

Personal assistant Jakob Holder, executive director of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, said the playwright died Friday at his home on Long Island after a short illness. Holder couldn’t provide a cause of death.

“He invented a new language — the first authentically new voice in theater since Tennessee Williams,” said playwright Terrence McNally, who lived with Albee for more than six years in the 1960s and recalled Albee’s toughness (“he was not a gusher, he didn’t ‘love’ anything”) and distinctive way with dialogue.

 

Eward Albee

Edward Albee: Part-time pussycat

Charles McNuly
February 4, 2009

Edward Albee, without question our nation’s greatest living playwright, lives just the way you might expect him to -- in a rarefied artistic ozone that feels completely at home to him.

African sculptures and 20th century European and American paintings proliferate in his TriBeCa loft like wildflowers on a sunny hillside. An elevator opens directly to the apartment, where a flirty feline named Abigail, a part Abyssinian acrobat, insists on making friends before allowing entry into this heightened realm, in which a Kandinsky and a Chagall stare each other down, a little Picasso etching lurks on a back table, and alarming masks and seemingly animate artifacts track your every move.