Albee gives lecture of the absurd

From the beginning of last Thursday's Maynard Mack Lecture at the University Theater, the featured speaker made one thing clear. "It's not a lecture," playwright Edward Albee half-shouted over Professor Murray Biggs' introduction, and the audience laughed at the affable man with gray hair and darkened glasses. It wouldn't be the last time Albee surprised the audience, and it wouldn't nearly be the loudest laughter evoked. And it certainly wasn't just a lecture.

TANYA PALOMO/YH Later, Albee's alter ego, Tony Clifton, dropped in.

"Edward Albee in Conversation" was a question-and-answer session with the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, best known for shockingly hilarious works like The Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Born an orphan, adopted and raised by a wealthy New York family, Albee started writing poetry at the age of eight, but never stopped feeling like "someone writing poems rather than a poet," though he was quick to note that "most of the poems I wrote at 28 were better than the ones I wrote at eight...most of them."

The two novels he wrote at 14 and 16 were even less successful, at least by Albee's standards, and he had problems writing short stories. "Short Story and I had great disagreements about their nature, and I found out Short Story was right." His first play, a three-act sex farce written at age 12, "when I knew little about either sex or farce" was similarly inauspicious. Eight years later, after graduating from Choate and being thrown out of both Trinity College and his adopted family ("They didn't want me to be a writer, an artist, when they wanted me to be something different, like a Republican"), Albee found himself living in Greenwich Village. With so much artistic wisdom around him, Albee was content to write sparingly, work for Western Union, and "keep my mouth shut for ten years" while absorbing the knowledge of others. It wasn't until he was 30, in 1959, when Albee wrote The Zoo Story with a typewriter and some paper "liberated" from Western Union.

Though Albee himself isn't quite comfortable having his work labeled as theater of the absurd, the premiere of The Zoo Story was certainly an absurd one. The one-act finally ended up in the hands of a German company, giving him the unusual experience of watching his own world premiere translated into a language he didn't speak a word of. The American Dream, The Sandbox, and The Death of Bessie Smith, which attacked artificial American values and racism, followed. When asked if he believes his work has solved any problems, Albee answered no, though he did see a bright side: "they keep doing our plays...they're still useful because no one's paying attention."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee's greatest commercial success, was so potent a script that famed acting teacher Lee Strasburg wanted in, eventually forcing Albee to be assertive; "I found a gentle way to say `Fuck you.'" The play went on to become a major movie hit as well, though it was less than successful with Albee himself. "Playwrights get rather spoiled in their control over their scripts," he noted, "So movies are like the seventh layer of hell in Dante to us, `abandon all hope, all who enter here.'" Though Albee objected to the "movie magic" that cast a 32-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in a role intended for a 52-year-old and got rid of the play's claustrophobic feel, he admits he got away relatively unscathed. Albee also appreciated the extra exposure from the film: "To have your work seen by a hundred million people as a play would take centuries and centuries."

With one new play (About a Boy) on its way to Broadway, another (The Goat (Who Is Sylvia?)) in process, and a career as a professor at the University of Houston, Albee keeps himself quite busy even at the age of 81. When asked what he looks for in selecting students for his playwriting workshops, Albee says creative failure is better than traditional success: "I look for plays that fail intelligently and interestingly...rather than stuff that just lies there and wants to be successful." Words of wisdom from a playwright never content with mere normalcy.

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