Biography EssayIn the early 1960s it was customary to find the names of four young playwrights linked: Edward Albee, Jack Gelber, Arthur Kopit, and Jack Richardson. These, and certain others like them...
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American playwright Edward Franklin Albee, III (born 1928), achieved great success in the early 1960s with his one-act plays and the immensely popular full-length work Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"E...
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Edward Albee is a playwright best known for such award-winning dramas as The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", Tiny Alice, and Three Tall Women. With his confrontational dramas and decidedly...
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In the early 1960s it was customary to find the names of four young playwrights linked: Edward Albee, Jack Gelber, Arthur Kopit, and Jack Richardson. These, and certain others like them, wished to pre...
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Early in the twentieth century, American theater critics and drama scholars wondered where the native modern dramatists were--the American equals to Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov-...
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Critical Essay by Richard Schechner
Albee gratifies an adolescent culture which likes to think of itself as decadent.
We want to believe that we are living in the last days, that the world is falling ...
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Critical Essay by Alan Schneider
Without attempting to enthrone Albee alongside anyone (though I personally admire him above all other Americans now writing for the stage), or to hail Virginia Woolf a...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
The origin of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice seems to be the old homosexual joke about the identity of God, whose punch line is "Actually, she is black." S...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
If Albee were not so arrogant, one would view his desperate stratagems with pity. When you have failed with every kind of play, including adaptations of novels and other p...
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Critical Essay by Robbie Odom Moses
All Over confronts, as the title suggests, the endemic trait of all living organisms. Death, the great leveler to a poet like William Cullen Bryant, is, for Albee, ...
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Critical Essay by Thomas P. Adler
Counting the Ways is hardly even a play in any traditional understanding of the term. But then, Albee's works have come more and more of late to resemble music...
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Critical Essay by Joan S. Fleckenstein
Listening, a play with more substance, cohesiveness, and bite [than Counting the Ways], concerns three characters who meet in a garden to exchange insights, remi...
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Critical Essay by Rose A. Zimbardo
Somewhat startling is the realization that Albee's are traditional Christian symbols which, despite their modern dress, retain their original significance...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Albee is progressing. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was about the emptiness that surrounds and threatens to swallow our relationships; Tiny Alice was about the vo...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Edward Albee's All Over is about the dying of some unnamed and unclassified great man behind a screen in his living room, while in front of the screen his wife, mis...
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Critical Essay by Rachel Blau Duplessis
Albee transforms social "problems" for which no solution is offered into sexual and family strife, problems for which he has readily available sol...
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Critical Essay by Richard A. Duprey
It is incredible to consider that on the basis of four plays, one little more than a fragment, Edward Albee, the enfant terrible of America's avant garde, is...
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Critical Essay by Dan Sullivan
"The Man Who Had Three Arms," is about a man who had three arms.
That is to say a man who once had three arms, the extra having gradually sprouted from his...
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Critical Essay by Robert Brustein
Whenever I review a play by Edward Albee, I worry about the distribution of his royalties. He has such a perfect gift for theatrical mimicry that I begin to imagine A...
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In the following essay, Luere examines The Lorca Story: Scenes from a Life, in which, he asserts, Albee presents "an elegy for an artist's thwarted vision."
For over three decades...
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In the following essay, Worth examines Albee's treatment of evolution in his plays.
Albee is a playwright whose great distinctiveness is peculiarly hard to name and define. He has been claimed ...
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In the following essay, Casper explores the enigmatic quality of the structure, themes, characters, and language of Tiny Alice, and offers his own interpretations of the play.
When Edward Albee was as...
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In the following essay, Wasserman surveys the significance of Albee's treatment of language in his plays.
In response to an interviewer's question concerning the supposed lack of "...
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In the following piece, Albee addresses the label, Theatre of the Absurd, that had been attached to his work. He argues that "The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contem...
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In the essay below, Bigsby examines Albee's "insistence on the need to abandon a faith in illusion. "
American drama in the early sixties has been effectively dominated by one man...
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In the following excerpt from the expanded version of his groundbreaking 1961 work, Esslin discusses Albee's plays and declares The American Dream "Albee's promising and brilliant...
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In the following essay, the critic explores the recurring themes of isolation and separation throughout Albee's work.
Something tells me it's all happenin ' at the zoo. &...
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In the essay below, the critic expresses reservations about the "surface polish " of Albee's dialogue but concludes that he is "the most skillful composer of dialogue that ...
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In the following essay, Duplessis argues that in his plays Albee takes "questions of power, work, failure or success and privatiz[es them, making social issues appear exclusively as family issu...
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In the following essay, Kingsley observes how Albee's "struggle with reality and illusion endures throughout the major part of his career. "
Albee has had occasion more than once ...
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In the essay below Vos examines Albee's treatment of death in his plays.
In Edward Albee's play of 1967, Everything in the Garden, one of the major characters comments:
You should have ...
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In the essay that follows, Hughes presents a largely negative appraisal of Albee's works.
Almost from the moment of his first New York production, The Zoo Story (1960), Edward Albee has been re...
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In the essay below, Gabbard explores the theme of abandonment in The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, and The Sandbox, maintaining that each is a "unique picture of abandonment…all ...
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In the following essay, Yates charges that over the course of Albee's career his characters have grown increasingly abstract, eventually becoming "mere vehicles for the expression of...
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In the excerpt below, Simard explores Albee's technique of undercutting "conventional expectations by dividing his emphasis between external and internal reality. " The critic fur...
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In the excerpt below, Adler contends that Albee's early short plays "serve as a culmination or summing up of many of the central emphases of post-World War II American drama."
A c...
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In this excerpt, Roudané investigates Albee 's "affirmative vision of human experience. "Although the "world of the Albee play is undeniably saturated with death, �...
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The following interview, conducted by Laurence Maslon, was held in the fall of 1991 as part of the "Conversations with Leading American Playwrights " series sponsored by the Smithsonian ...
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In this conversation, Albee discusses the social and political content in his plays.
Despite wealthy adoptive parents who sent him to exclusive schools like Choate, Valley Forge, and Trinity College, ...
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Albee receiving the Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Play of 1964, for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In the following essay, Boxandoli delineates standard devices, situations, and...
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The following essay explores Albee's "problems with language, " arguing that "Albee's words, seemingly self-generative and unending, become substitutes for real acts...
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In the essay below, Knepler examines Albee's uneasy mixture of the American dramatic tradition, with its emphasis on rationality, causation, and explanation, with elements of the Theatre of the...
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Edward Albee's (1928) play Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1961-62) exhibits concern with the crises of faith of contemporary western civilization. This thematic concern is rooted in two sources.
F...
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Edward Franklin Albee, III
Edward Albee
Edward (Franklin) Albee (III)
