In the following essay, Krukman describes Albee's career by taking a look into a variety of his productions.

The much-besieged playwright defies conventional critical wisdom with a dazzling new play and a Broadway revival.

This oblique aphorism, about obliquity, was first uttered on a Berlin stage in 1959. One year later, when The Zoo Story came home to inaugurate the new Off-Broadway, the New York Post trumpeted Edward Albee as the "next Eugene O'Neill." For decades afterward, critics scorned him for trying to live up to the title. Jerry's insight proved to be an uncanny forecast of Albee's career in the American theatre. Albee has gone a long distance out of the way from that two-character one-act over the past four decades; his short-distance, four-year "comeback" seems, at age 70, correctly on track. Albee's 1994 Three Tall Women earned him his third Pulitzer; a fine-tuned revival of A Delicate Balance...