In Passing

The great American playwright Edward Albee died yesterday, September 16, 2016 at the age of 88. The theatre seems to me more than any other medium to reveal the human condition pointedly and in condensed fashion. Like so many great playwrights—Miller, Williams, Chekov, of course Shakespeare – before him, these artists show us a mirror of ourselves that we sometimes wish were left unrevealed (as when Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which won five Tony awards, was denied the Pulitzer by the advisory board despite being voted to receive it by the jurors.)  Freud, however, would have been proud of Albee’s explications of sex, aggression, and death.

In his first play Zoo Story (1958), Albee wrote about loneliness and miscommunication. In Woolf, he exposed the illusion of the prefect American family. [What couples therapist has not seen a George and Martha in the consulting room?] The Goat, Who is Sylvia? pushed the limits of liberal tolerance when Martin falls in love with a goat (bestiality) while being somewhat judgmental of his homosexual son. Albee received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994).