SOURCE: "The Rehabilitation of Edward Albee," in Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt, 1987–1994, Ivan R. Dee, 1994, pp. 204-9.

In the following excerpt, Brustein responds favorably to Three Tall Women, which he characterizes as "a mature piece of writing."

A number of years ago, while praising Edward Albee's much-reviled stage adaptation of Lolita, I commented on the startling reverses in the fortunes of this once lionized American dramatist: "The crunching noises the press pack makes while savaging his recent plays are in startling contrast to the slavering sounds they once made in licking his earlier ones…. If each man kills the thing he loves, then each critic kills the thing he hypes … brutalizing the very celebrity he has created."

I was generalizing not only from Albee's career but from that of Miller, Williams, and Inge, for although I had often depreciated works by these playwrights myself...