SOURCE: An interview with Edward Albee, in The Playwright's Art: Conversations with Contemporary Amer ican Dramatists, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 1-23.

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 Institution's Campus on the Mall program. Albee here discusses his approach to play writing and offers his views on the state of American theater.

[Laurence Maslon]: Why are you a playwright?

[Edward Albee]: Why am I a playwright? Because it's the only thing that I can do hallway decently. If there was anything else I could do, I probably would do it.

Weren't you a poet first?

I attempted poetry, I attempted novels, I wrote short stories and essays—and they were all terrible. I tried to be a composer and that didn't work, I...