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 America has produced. "

In the following essay, the critic explores the recurring themes of isolation and separation throughout Albee's work.

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.

In this excerpt, Roudané investigates Albee 's "affirmative vision of human experience. "Although the "world of the Albee play is undeniably saturated with death, " he observes, "the internal action, the subtextual dimension of his plays, reveals the playwright's compassion for his fellow human beings and a deep-rooted concern for the social contract. "

In the following essay, Worth examines Albee's treatment of evolution in his plays.

In the essay below, Bigsby examines Albee's "insistence on the need to abandon a faith in illusion. "

In the following essay, Wasserman surveys the significance of Albee's treatment of language in his plays.

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 hinged together by the shared and related themes of ambivalence, escape into fantasy, and preoccupation with death. "

Albee receiving the Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Play of 1964, for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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… ideas. "

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 issues, and solv[es] them as if they were family issues. "]

In the following essay, Kingsley observes how Albee's "struggle with reality and illusion endures throughout the major part of his career. "

In the essay that follows, Hughes presents a largely negative appraisal of Albee's works.

In the excerpt below, Simard explores Albee's technique of undercutting "conventional expectations by dividing his emphasis between external and internal reality. " The critic further argues that Albee's "realistic framework, the family, serves as the point of departure for his own type of subjective reality, an examination of his characters ' psyches."

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."

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.

In the essay below Vos examines Albee's treatment of death in his plays.

The following essay explores Albee's "problems with language, " arguing that "Albee's words, seemingly self-generative and unending, become substitutes for real acts. "

In this conversation, Albee discusses the social and political content in his plays.

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 Absurd, with its stress on senselessness and incomprehension.

Albee transforms social "problems" for which no solution is offered into sexual and family strife, problems for which he has readily available solutions…. Two prominent problems resolved by the ending of Virginia Woolf concern the bitch goddess, who is tamed, and the non-existent child, who is "killed." Martha is a brilliantly constructed and dramatically sufficient portrait of the stereotypical emasculating woman. The missing male child is doubly non-existent, for he is f...

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 contemporary theatre, facing as it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and that the supposed Realistic theatre—the term used here to mean most of what is done on Broadway—in the sense that it panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance and ...

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."

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 first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd."

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 being seriously considered in many quarters as a genuinely important playwright. The same critics and theorists who deny Thornton Wilder his legitimate right to be called a great playwright because he has written so little are ready to canonize young Albee as the greatest thing in modern drama. This neatly tailored young man, who sounds quite ra...

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, man's final confrontation with life. In the play, death is tantamount to a metaphysical conceit, with the death of the body being but one thematic strain. The famous man, whose dying is both a public event for the press and the crowd awaiting word of his demise, and a private ritual for the circle of intimates assembled for the vigil, is t...

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 as a classic of the modern theatre (which I have no doubt it will become), I would only state that, in my experience, a more honest or moral (in the true sense) playwright does not exist—unless it be Samuel Beckett. To blame Albee for the "sickness" of his subject matter is like blaming the world's ashcans on the cre...

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." Since, however, it is no longer safe socially, let alone financially, to be jocular about Negroes, the God of Tiny Alice is, outwardly at least, white. But she is a bitch. (pp. 62-3) It has been contended that Tiny Alice is based on Manichaeanism, or on Genet's notions of evil being good, and good evil. Accordingly, Alice may be God,...

"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 back in midlife, like an angel's wing or a unicorn's horn or a late-blooming talent, bringing him fame, fortune and appearances on all the talk shows.

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 in on our heads, that only our sickest illusions are able to offer us any reason for living. Everyone wants to be Nero watching Rome burn. To attend the last orgy, to be part of it, this is a comfortable and exciting escape from reality—the child's way out. Albee's characters, like the playwright himself, suffer from arrested...

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 August Strindberg, Eugene O'Neill, and T. S. Eliot rising from their graves to demand for their estates a proper share of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tiny Alice, and A Delicate Balance. Even living authors like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter might be contemplating a case against Albee, not so much for expropr...

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 people's plays, the last remaining maneuver is the nonplay. Finding himself in a box, Albee has contrived two interlocking nonplays, based, apparently, on a mathematical error: it is by multiplying, not by adding, minuses that you get a plus. Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, when run together like two ink blots of differ...

Somewhat startling is the realization that Albee's are traditional Christian symbols which, despite their modern dress, retain their original significance—or, more precisely, express their original significance in modern terms. The relationship between traditional symbol and naturalistic dialogue, situation and setting is, however, never forced, as it so often is in, say, a Williams' play. (p. 45) What Albee has written in The Zoo Story is a modern Morality play. The theme is the centur...

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, mistress, son, daughter, lawyer, doctor and nurse talk, wrangle, and have an occasional tantrum. The play is so eventless, point-less, and, above all, lifeless that it could actually have been improved by being turned around on its axis. Then, at least, we could have witnessed some hemorrhages, bladder discharges, oscultations, injections, pe...

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 musical compositions, and this is no exception; as he says of it: "What I intended was something like a set of piano pieces by Satie." If in Seascape, his most recent full-length play, there was still a conflict eventuating in one of Albee's typical highly charged climaxes, here one can just barely discern the outlines of a conf...

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 void lurking behind our deepest beliefs; now, A Delicate Balance is about the nothingness, the bare nothingness of it all—it is a play about nothing…. [The] nothingness—perhaps more accurately nothingness—of Albee's play is petty, self-indulgent, stationary. Albee's nothing is as dull as anything. (p...

Listening, a play with more substance, cohesiveness, and bite [than Counting the Ways], concerns three characters who meet in a garden to exchange insights, reminiscences, and insults until one of them, who is insane, commits suicide. Although sounding some echoes of The Zoo Story (an apparently insane person elicits truth from an apparently sane one and then dies), Listening slowly, painstakingly, and with some surprises uncovers powerful and revealing relationships while playing with the nuance and preten...