Conversation Albee

7/31/2019 Conversation Albee

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Edward Albee in Conversation with Fiona Reid

Edward Albee: You know its always a little threatening to get your applause at the

beginning of an evening.

Fiona Reid: Mr. Albee, recently there was an article in the New York Times I think

it was in the travel section and you wrote about going to Easter Island.

Was that a trip that you enjoyed very much?

Edward Albee: Easter Island I discovered reading about, oh, I guess before you could get

there and I decided that I had to get there eventually. And, getting on these

days it occurred to me that if I wanted to get to Easter Island, Id better do

it. So I took an eleven-hour flight from New York to Santiago, rested a

little bit and took a five-hour flight straight out into the pacific, and ended

up on this tiny little 9 by 15 mile island. There were three giant volcanoes,

most of them dead with lava and 942 of the most amazing sculptures I had

ever seen in my life. Amazing experience. I couldnt have gotten there

when I wanted to get there originally, there were no planes. Or if there

were, they werent going there.

Fiona Reid: Your interest in visual art and indeed, music is well known, I wonder if

you could discuss briefly, how it informs your work as a playwright.

Edward Albee: I dont think you can be involved in any one of the arts unless you know

a great deal about the other arts, and this is especially true if you are a

playwright. Because a play is very, very interesting. It is literature but it is

also a seen and a heard experience. Writing a play is so related to writing a

string quartet, say. I wanted to be a composer when I was about eight. I

discovered Bach and I thought that was good, and I thought I should do

that, but I couldnt. I got very interested in the visual arts when I was

about 10, but I was pretty bad there too. But then it occurred to me that if I


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wrote plays, I could write music and a visual experience at the same time,

as well as literature.

Fiona Reid: Do you hear your characters talking as you write? Do you speak out loud?

Edward Albee: When I am putting a play down on paper, I hear it and I see it as a play

being performed in front of me when I am writing it. I hear them and I see

them speak. I think this saves me a lot of time. I dont rewrite very much.

I think I wait a very long time until the play is ready to be written down

and then I write it. And I dont rewrite. I rewrite barely at all, but I think

its because I wait so long until I know the characters so well that I can

trust them to do all the work for me.

Fiona Reid: Could we talk a little bit about your time before The Zoo Story, in New

York in those days. I gather you knew Thornton Wilder a little bit and he

encouraged you to leap from poetry into playwriting.

Edward Albee: Thats a funny story; Ill tell you that one. I was an orphan and I was

adopted by a wealthy family when I was about a week old. We didnt get

along very well. They gave me a wonderful education, a really marvelous

private school education, where I had teachers who understood that I had a

lot of interesting things going on in my head that they should help me

develop, way before I should have been able to develop those things. They

were very good teachers and helped me a lot to figure out my nature and

what I planned to practice.

I got thrown out of college when I was eighteen. Id gotten to college and

discovered for the first two years I was there, I was expected to participate

in something called required courses, you may have heard of these. I took

a look at these required courses and I discovered that they were not

courses that I required. So I didnt go to them. I took a lot of the courses


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the seniors were taking, getting a very good education on a graduating

level and being marked absent and failing all my required courses. Having

gotten thrown out of a number of schools before that, this was it for my

adopted parents and that was just fine with me. They disowned me,

disinherited me and sent me off to Greenwich Village, the best thing that

ever happened to me.

I spent the next ten years living in Greenwich Village continuing my

education, learning more about the visual arts, about music, about writing.

It was a very exciting time in the late 1940s and early 50s in New York

City. All of the great avant-garde work was getting to be done in the small

theatres in New York. We got to know all about Beckett and Ionesco and

Genet and Pirandello and Brecht and all those good folk and we got to

know about that, and all the abstract expressionist painters and a little later

on, the beat generation poets. It was a really wonderful ten, fifteen-year

period of being in New York. Having gotten disowned and disinherited, I

didnt have any money to speak of and I had a maternal grandmother, who

knew I wasnt going to work out very well with these people, so she left

me a tiny little trust fund, which as I remember, kept me in beer, but not

much else, and so I had to take a lot of odd jobs.

Fiona Reid: So this is where you were working with Western Union.

Edward Albee: Well, I took a lovely job delivering telegrams for Western Union. It kept

me outdoors, climbing lots of stairs and I met a lot of very interesting

people. They didnt care if I showed up for work or not. That was fun, I

was having a great time. This is referred to as the terrible period of his life.

That came later with critics. But I had a marvelous time living in

Greenwich Village and educating myself, informing myself about things,

and finally wrote a play. I started writing poetry when I was about eight,

stopped when I was twenty-eight, because I wasnt getting much better.


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Wrote two novels in my teens, really, really bad novels and the short story

and I had serious disagreements. But, I must tell you I wrote what I

consider one of the best first sentences in any American short story, ever.

This was a short story set in Italy, and the first sentence was Everything

in Rome is uphill.

Fiona Reid: Yet to be completed.

Edward Albee: That is so good. Unfortunately, everything in the story from that point on

was downhill, and that ended that. I knew a lot of people who were going

to places like the MacDowell colony and stuff like that. I was visiting a

composer at the MacDowell colony when I was in my early twenties and I

hadnt written any plays, of course. But I ran into a guy, shortish, balding,

moustached, famous, I knew who he was. And all of us in those days, I

dont know if it still happens, but all of us carried little trunks filled with

our manuscripts, you never know when theyre going to come in handy.

So I grabbed twenty five or thirty of my poems, thats all I was composing

in those days and located this guy and I went into my act Id done this

to Auden a couple of years before, that worked out ok I thrust my

poems out, I said I am Edward Albee, Im a poet, please read these.

This guy was Thornton Wilder. He found me lurking under some pine

trees the other day and he said, Albee, Ive read these poems. I want to

take you out and get you drunk. Auden hadnt said this to me. So what I

figured was that the quality of the poetry since my experience with Auden

had gotten so much better that Wilder could not bring himself to discuss it

with me sober. Its a logical conclusion. So we went in a little beat up car

he had, I forget what it was, a Chevy maybe, out to one of the tiny lakelets

that dot the New Hampshire country side. He had a bottle of bourbon with

him, and I remember as the sun was setting and the level of the bottle of

bourbon kept sinking because we kept drinking more of it. Wilder started


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discussing my poetry with me. And I remember, or I remember

remembering anyway, that whenever he finished discussing one of my

poems, he set it afloat on the water. There were 25 or 30 poems and when

we finished, the whole surface of the pond was covered with my work and

he said, Albee, I have read these poems. And I said, Yes, I can see

that. And he said, I have read all of these poems Albee, have you ever

thought about writing plays?

Now, considering what happened later, I dont think that Wilder was

suggesting what he saw in the poetry the incipient playwright; I dont

think it was anything interesting. I think he was trying to save poetry from

me. But about eight years later, I wrote a play called The Zoo Story, which

I sent to him of course, remembering that experience and he didnt seem

particularly happy to get it.

Fiona Reid: Perhaps he didnt quite understand it. It took a while before it was

produced in New York.

Edward Albee: A perfectly simple, straightforward play. A perfectly simple little play

and hes a good playwright. I do think that if you can ever get a chance to

see a good production ofOur Town, which is very, very infrequent, since

most people seem to think its a nursery rhyme or a sentimental thing. Its

really a tough existentialist. I think its one of, if not the, best American

play ever written, it breaks my heart every time I see a good production of

it. He didnt seem to likeZoo Story very much.

Fiona Reid: It took a circuitous route through Europe, didnt it, and ended up in

Berlin?

Edward Albee: It did. I knew a lot of composers in those days, and a composer friend of

mine named Bill Flannigan, sent it to one of his former teachers, an


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American composer named David Diamond, who was living in Florence,

Italy, who read the play and liked it. He sent it to a Swiss chairman actor

friend of his, this is very circuitous, almost as circuitous as Easter Island

who was living in Switzerland, who read the play and liked it, translated it

and sent it on to a woman who ran the drama department of the S. Fischer

publishing house, which happened to be owned by this actors wifes

father.

They liked it and they needed a play to be done in West Berlin at the

Schiller Theatre Werkstatt with a play by Samuel Beckett called Krapps

Last Tape and they thought thatZoo Story would make a nice, cheap

production. You know two characters inZoo Story, one character in

Krapps Last Tape, you cant get much more economic than that. They did

the plays together in German. Its pretty unusual for an American

playwright, to have his first premire in a language he doesnt speak. But

that worked out ok, it got very, very good reviews in German.

The New York Times did a big story about it, saying American

playwright cant get his work done in New York. I hadnt tried, you

understand, but let that pass, take it where you can get it, and has to go to

Berlin to get his play done. So four months after it opened in Berlin in

German, it opened on a double bill again with a Beckett play, both plays in

English at the Provincetown playhouse in New York City, where it ran for

three years and I said goodbye to Western Union.

Fiona Reid: And it wasnt too long after that you decided you wanted to pen a three-act

play.

Edward Albee: Well, it was three plays later, it wasAmerican Dream,Death of Bessie

Smith, and The Sandbox. I dont know whether I decided I wanted to do a

three-act play. I dont think I just woke up one morning and said, You


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know I think I want to do a three act play No, I became aware that I had

been thinking about a play that probably wanted to be a three act. Because

we were allowed to have three act plays in those days. The managements

to theatres are telling us that we cant have three act plays anymore.

But I did realize it was going to be a three act play, and I realized it was

going to be just about as long as my first four plays put together and that

seemed ok, that seemed fair, so I wrote it, called Whos Afraid of Virginia

Woolf, though that wasnt the original title. The original title was The

Exorcism and then it got to be called The Exorcismor Whos Afraid of

Virginia Woolf? and then I got wise to myself and called it Whos Afraid

of Virginia Woolf? Do you know what the original title ofA Streetcar

Named Desire was?

Fiona Reid: Oh, The Poker Night

Edward Albee: Yes, very interesting, sometimes we get onto ourselves and get good

titles.

Fiona Reid: And was there not an allusion to the poker night in Virginia Woolfbecause

there are at least two versions.

Edward Albee: Well, there are probably more by now.

Fiona Reid: Because you made some changes before the recent Broadway version.

Edward Albee: Well, Id been cutting the play a little bit. I felt like I was being maybe a

little bit self-indulgent, so I cut maybe ten minutes out of the whole play

over a 25-year period. Now I have it where I want it.

Fiona Reid: It goes like a bat out of hell. I mean for a play that is three hours long.


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Edward Albee: Well, its no longer three hours long. It was only three hours long with

intermissions. You know one company, as I told you they dont like three

acts anymore, they dont like two intermissions, a company in Sweden did

it and they decided to have one intermission, right in the middle of act

two.

Fiona Reid: Yes, I heard about this, but you stopped that pretty soon.

Edward Albee: Well, that was opening night, and I went backstage afterwards and I said,

if you want to have a second night, you will have two intermissions.

Fiona Reid: Now, people say about you, that you vet every cast list, but you cant,

there are so many productions of your plays, but is that true that you vet

resumes?

Edward Albee: I like to know who is doing my plays. Now I am fortunate, there are a lot

of productions of my plays and Ive got so many plays, Ive got 28 of

them now, they get done occasionally. But most professional productions

in what we refer to as large cities, I like to have my say as to who is

directing it and who is going to be in it and who the designers are. Its my

play. And there are some people I like to be in my plays and some people I

dont. There are only three actors who I have worked with who I will

never work with again. And Im not going to tell you who they are.

Fiona Reid: What about directors, surely thats even more dangerous, isnt it?

Edward Albee: Well, you learn pretty soon that there are some wonderful directors. I

started off working with some good ones. Alan Schneider.

Fiona Reid: What is it you liked particularly about Alan Schneider.


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Edward Albee: Alan Schneider had respect, he didnt like to direct plays that he didnt

respect. He liked to direct the play the way the author intended it. This is a

fairly unusual concept. Where directors feel that they know more about the

play than the playwright does. So I like to be sure that I am working with a

director who plans to direct the play that I wrote. You know, working with

actors who I know can play the characters. Its not too difficult to figure

that out.

Fiona Reid: Well, do you look for actors with more classical experience, do you think

that they have the tendency to better serve the play. Because some actors

feel that the play is there to serve them.

Edward Albee: Youve noticed that?

Fiona Reid: I have. And sometimes one can feel a bit stupid for hanging out the script

to the word and it seems to be less and less fashionable.

Edward Albee: Since most of the characters that I write about, since those are the ones

that interest me are reasonably articulate and intelligent people, I like to

have actors who can handle sentences of more than four words.

Fiona Reid: And one of the aspects of your writing that I notice as I rehearse it, is if

you mess one word up, or put in an extra word, youll mess it up.

Edward Albee: The rhythms go to pieces. Because I hear the piece as I write each

speech. I hear the way it sounds; I hear the rhythms of it. Thats something

very interesting that I learned to do as a director, directing both my work

and Becketts over the years. When the actors knew their lines and I would

go way back in the theatre and I discovered that I didnt need to watch

much of what was going on, because blocking is a fairly simple and


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straightforward thing, get people on and up and down. I would listen and I

would conduct. And if the play was being performed the way the author

wrote it, I could conduct it and I could hear it like a piece of music, and

that reminded me more than anything else, that writing a play and writing

a string quartet are very related matters.

Fiona Reid: So you would just say to an actor, directing, Youre just too slow?

Edward Albee: You want to say, Its too fucking slow.

Fiona Reid: Think faster, is my favourite one.

Edward Albee: But you have to say things like, Whats your motivation at?

Fiona Reid: I cant see you saying that somehow.

Edward Albee: No, I usually say, Its too fucking slow.

Fiona Reid: Can we jump a few decades to The Goat or Who is Silvia?, just because I

know many people here will be interested in that as a play. This is a play

that you have said over and over again, that its not a play about bestiality,

it is about the limits of tolerance. Youve also said that reading a play

should stand on its own. Youve talked about the ability to read a play and

experience a play by reading it. And I have to admit that reading The Goat

and seeing The Goatseem to me two distinctly different experiences, but I

think its probably just a failure of imagination.

Edward Albee: Well, lets examine what a composer does. A composer knows how to

read music. So a friend of his can send him his newest string quartet, and

say, Hey, you want to read something? The composer gets the string

quartet and he looks at it and he reads it and he hears the string quarter by


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reading it. Im convinced that its not too difficult to be able to train

yourself to see and hear a play by reading it. Now if you see and hear a

play by reading it, the one thing youre not getting is the probably slight

distortion that almost every production of a play is. Because every

production of a play is an opinion: the directors opinion, an actors

opinion. And it will differ from time to time. Every time a critic goes to

see a play, what a critic is reviewing is his opinion of the opinion that hes

experiencing, which quite often can be some distance removed from what

the playwright intended. So I love to read plays before I go to see them. I

love to read a play, because Ive had so much experience as a director

also, and see how the production of the play related to the production that

I have seen and heard by reading it. I dont know why people dont read

plays, theyre a lot cheaper.

Fiona Reid: You mentioned critics can we talk about whether or not you read them

at all? Are there critics who you respect, and why?

Edward Albee: I was at a symposium the other night in New York City, at the Stella

Adler studio as you know she was married to Harold Clurman, the great

critic. We were talking about great critics and lesser critics. Harold

Clurmanwas one of those extraordinary critics who was totallyknowledgeable as a craftsman in theatre. He knew how to direct, he loved

serious theatre, he cared a great deal about it and he understood that his

function was to serve serious theatre as much as he could. He was not in

the critical racket to show off how clever he was or to get a better job on

another newspaper or to have an enemies list. I think a critic is there to

help an audience find its way through the junk that fills our commercial

theatre. Every year on Broadway there are 80 plays done, I think there are

maybe two plays that are worth anybody spending any time at. A good

critic will lead the audience to find something that matters, and will not be


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tolerant of the commercial junk that is put on only to make money in front

of an audience that really doesnt seem to care what it sees.

Fiona Reid: To go back to The Goat or Who is Sylvia? I suppose you did have a clear

notion of how much that play would shock, and surely there must have

been

Edward Albee: A play about fucking a goat, shocking?

Edward Albee: That would shock us considering what the Bush administration is doing?

You know the Goat didnt start out being a play that involved bestiality,

but it is a play about the limits of tolerance. It began being about

something totally other. I wanted to write a play about the limits of our

tolerance, as what we would be willing to comprehend as something we

should be willing to think about and I got a very interesting idea just about

two years before I wrote that play down. That heres a doctor, a very, very

well known, famous marvelous doctor. Who everything is going well in

his life, hes got a good wife, a couple good kids, making money,

everything is going just fine, but he feels that hes not participating fully in

the lives of his patience and I was thinking about this in the days before

AIDS became a fairly manageable disease, when it was a death sentence

and the doctor, to understand what so many of his patients were going

through, he infected himself with the AIDS virus. I mentioned this to a

couple of friends of mine and they said you cant do this. It will be the end

of your career, nobody will tolerate this, no one will accept it; you cant do

it. Well, fortunately another playwright got the idea, because I had been

talking about it a little bit. He wrote a play about a doctor who infects

himself with the AIDS virus to find out what it was like to be one of his

patients, and that play closed instantly.


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So I still had my concern, and Id been teaching at the University of

Houston for twelve or thirteen years and thats a pretty good university, a

lot of farm boys down there turn out to be Nobel Prize winners, and so I

started talking to them because I was very interested in what goes on with

farm kids, Id done my reading about farm kids. And so Id go up to this

Nobel Prize winner and say, hey, you grew up on a farm in Texas. Oh

yeah I sure did. Tell me did you guys ever have anything to do with the

animals? You cant imagine the number of very, very interesting stories

that I heard about having sex with the farm stuff was not an unusual

occurrence among farm kids that grew up to be Nobel Prize winners. So I

realized that this was not an untoward event to be handling. So that play

turned into The Goat, but still it was not about bestiality. Bestiality occurs,

but what I want everybody who goes to see that play come out of it not

having made value judgments, but to imagine how they would respond

themselves if it happened in their environment, if it happened in their

family, how they would respond to this.

I did the play in one act finally, in one way to not give people

intermissions so they could walk out. Also it wasnt a terribly long play. It

fascinated me and there were people walking out almost every

performance, but they werent walking out when the revelation of the

bestiality was made, they werent walking out then, they werent walking

out when the suggestion was made that Jesus was quite possibly an

intentional suicide. Most of the people would get up and walk out when

the father and the son sexually kissed one another. That made me think,

where the hell are we as a society that thats where we will walk out of a

play of this nature and this complexity. That it is that that is so upsetting.

I also evolved a theory, it was usually a middle-aged couple that got up

and walked out, I evolved the theory that it was the same couple every


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night. Even though I knew it wasnt. But it sort of looked the same. But I

liked the idea that they kept going back.

Fiona Reid: Was he really kissing him?

Edward Albee: To see if that was really happening so they could get up and leave again.

Fiona Reid: But you dont accept that the idea of father sexually kissing his son is

probably the last taboo? Not the idea of a man kissing a man, but a father

kissing his son.

Edward Albee: Well, certainly compared to the taboo of a man having sex with a goat?

Fiona Reid: If we could just touch on Three Tall Women, this is a play that you have

said that you had been writing all your life.

Edward Albee: Well, Three Tall Women was based on my observations over the eighteen

years I could stand it of living with my adopted mother, and it was all

about her, and just about every line that she speaks in the play is

something that she said in real life. Except, while I was writing it, I was

completely convinced I was writing something that no one had ever said

except the character, which is the only way you can do anything. And

some people who knew her, especially towards the end of her life said I

was much too nice to her. You see I wasnt after a revenge play. I was

after an examination of this woman who I did not like, but admired for so

much of what she managed to get through.

Fiona Reid: I think one of the triumphs of that play is the underlying generosity that

ripples underneath. Its unspoken really, but as angry as she is at her son,

theres an eloquence thats unspoken really.


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Edward Albee: Well, we had a long life together.

Fiona Reid: Can you speak for a little about some of your other concerns. Youve been

very active at the Dramatist Guild. The artists colony in Montauk named

after your friend Bill Flannigan. And I would love to hear you talking

about whether the world is worse off now that you thought

Edward Albee: Before I started writing plays?

Fiona Reid: Well, no even last week say. It gets worse every day, doesnt it?

Edward Albee: If you get involved in the arts, you develop an awful lot of

responsibilities. If you have the opportunity to help people that you think

are talented, then it is your responsibility to do it. There is not enough

good theatre being performed. There is not enough good theatre being

written. If you come upon someone who is talented, you encourage them

to go on, in spite of the odds of anything very, very good becoming

commercially successful, because we have to face so much awfulness and

the crap that the commerce gives us as art in this country. So its a

responsibility to encourage those people who you think should be

encouraged, and the extent of that, I was earning a lot of money with

Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolfand in those days, taxes were pretty high,

and a very bright man who was my accountant said why dont you start a

foundation that way you wont have to give all this money to the

government? You can start a foundation and provide living and working

space for people in the arts. So I did that about 35 years ago. You have

responsibilities to make the arts a tolerable place to live and work in and

those are your responsibilities. Anyone who doesnt live up to those

responsibilities is being selfish.


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Fiona Reid: And a particular feature about the colony at Montauk is its cross-

disciplined, isnt it? You have sculptors

Edward Albee: Visual artists and composers and painters and playwrights and novelists

and poets and everybody. I think that one of the things that we lack in the

arts is that we get so involved in our own craft, that we dont spend much

time seeing how other people work, understanding what their problems are

and understanding the cross-fertilization that goes on between the arts. I

mean I understood that very early on, that being a playwright required

understanding classical music, understanding painting and art also. But not

enough people spent enough time with the other arts, so its very nice to

be able to be helpful in that way.

Fiona Reid: Could we get your opinions in the state of America today?

Edward Albee: Worse than I ever imagined. I think its far more dangerous than it ever

has been. I mean I used to think it was bad enough with Nixon, but he was

just a crook. How can I phrase my feelings about the present president? I

suppose its alright that he thinks that he has long conversations with God.

What troubles me is the concept of a God who would talk to him.

Democracy is very, very fragile and I think the United States is in far

greater danger of losing its democracy now than ever. I dont understand

the passivity of my society. I dont understand why people are up in arms

about it.

Fiona Reid: Has faith got something to do with it?

Edward Albee: Faith in what?

Fiona Reid: That people are indulging in faith more than truth.


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Edward Albee: Im glad you are making that distinction. Its a very interesting

distinction that can be made between faith and truth. But I just dont

understand how we can be this passive a society to see the inroads being

made against everything that we value as a society and that our

constitution gives us. These things being removed constantly from us, on

the idea that we will be protected; that the only way to preserve

democracy is to destroy it, apparently.

Fiona Reid: Lets open to questions.

Audience: Do you think that the state of theatre today reflects the world were living

in?

Edward Albee: I think the fact that commerce and economics have taken over the arts so

completely and they seem to be able to sell to people the need to

participate in something that really doesnt matter and really doesnt

concern anything altogether. Escapism rather than engagement is highly

troubling. It is basically big business and commerce that has been doing

serious damage to the arts in the United States. I was thinking about great

filmmakers, weve got some filmmakers in this country that we like and

who are pretty good filmmakers, but I was thinking as to where are the

American Kurosawas, where are the American Ingmar Bergmans?

American films are such an example of excess and corruption that we

arent going to have those people, or very seldom. We have a lot of first-

rate people performing in the arts in the United States. We have a lot of

good playwrights, good poets and novelists and they are very seldom on

the bestseller list however. Do you know, that in the same way that, this

might not happen in this country yet, in the same way that supermarkets

sell shelf space to certain cereal manufacturers so that their boxes of cereal

will be seen by anyone who comes into the store, do you know that major

bookstores in the United States are now selling shelf space to publishers so


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that not very good books are getting infinitely more publicity and are

being sold more and really good books are being pushed over to the

corner.

Fiona Reid: I think we have something similar, with Heathers picks.

Edward Albee: In a democracy, you can have anything you want. You can have a healthy

state of the arts, or you can have an unhealthy state of the arts. In a

democracy you can have anything you want. The problem is you end up

with exactly what you deserve.

Audience: Can you talk aboutHomelife?

Edward Albee: Ok,Homelife. Yes, many of you may not know whatHomelife is. Forty-

eight years ago I wrote a play called The Zoo Story, is it really forty-eight

years ago? Wow, time passes when youre having fun. A couple of years

ago, Id always thought with that play, you know, you wrote one really

fully developed character in that play, the character of Jerry. And the

character of Peter is basically there as sort of a sounding board; hes really

not as developed a character. Some day you must do something about this.

So we go 46 years and I suddenly realized what I planned to do. I planned

to write another one act play calledHomelife with the character Peter at

home with his wife Anne, I knew his wifes name was Anne all of a

sudden and I hadnt thought about her, ever and so I wrote a 45 min play

with Peter and his wife Anne at home at dinner before he goes into the

park to sit on the bench and meets Jerry.

The two plays, which have been performed together only once at the

Hartford Stage Company, I understand a great deal more about the

character Peter, I understand a great deal more about why The Zoo Story

exists and I find that the two plays are a much better experience than by


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themselves. But heres whats most interesting. I hadnt thought about the

character of Peter, really for all of those years, but I still knew who he was

when I wroteHomelife. I still knew who he was, and Id never thought

about his wife, but I still knew who she was. I had no trouble reinventing

these people; I still knew who they were. It seemed in writing this first act

of the play, which is now called Peter and Jerry, its as though I hadnt

written it, but I had. If you follow me, it was already there in my

unconscious and I just had to translate that from the unconscious to the

conscious. Its a much better play, having the two of them together, and I

think thats whats going to happen from now on. So all you people who

are planning to do The Zoo Story all by itself, nah.

Fiona Reid: Its not allowed.

Edward Albee: It wont be. Thats going to happen in the next six months.

Audience: Do you think its possible that a new kind of American Dream has been

emerging in America recently?

Edward Albee: Something closer to an American nightmare than an American Dream. I

know Im an American playwright, all of my play are set in America, I

consider myself an American playwright, but I dont consider myself

parochial. I hope that the plays do relate to other societies, other

communities, but I know that they are written about people who live in the

United State, by a person who lives in the United States. Im aware of that

distinction. But I do find that generally speaking, that they dont tend to be

obscure to people in other countries, which is nice maybe one or two of

them. Maybe The Death of Bessie Smith in Uzbekistan where they did not

have a black problem in the 30s as we did in America.


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Audience: You were talking earlier about every play being the synthesis of opinions,

of the director, etc. Can this ever be a happy thing for a playwright?

Edward Albee: It all depends on the quality of the play. Now, if youre involved as most

people are in the theatre, then you have discovered already that far more

often than you would like, you are involved with plays that you dont

admire. Because plays that are not terribly admirable are much more

popular than plays that are. If a play is very bad, aside from the fact that

there is a thing called copyright, and at the Dramatists Guild we protect

our copyright holders, and not a word of the play may be changed without

the authors position and if any words are changed, the author retains

ownership if anything is changed. It doesnt really matter aside from that.

If theres a really rotten play that doesnt have any three dimensionality to

it, and the characters are stick figures than the director and the actors have

got to do a lot of work to try and make believable sense out of a really

rotten play. However, if you are doing a production of Chekhovs Uncle

Vanya, say, Chekhov doesnt need your help. Your responsibility as an

actor or director in a Chekhov play is to prove that you are as three

dimensional as what Chekhov wrote. So the better the play, the greater the

responsibility of the director and the actors to the task; and the

unlikelihood that the production is going to be any better than the play.

Its nice if you can get a production ofUncle Vanya thats almost as good

as the play is. Thats nice. Maybe one out of a hundred productions will

come close to being as good as the play is. Bad plays need an awful lot

more creativity from actors and directors than really good plays do.

Audience: What do you think about work-shopping plays?

Edward Albee: What do I think of the idea of work-shopping plays? Aside from the fact

that it is one of the ugliest words in the English language, perhaps almost

as ugly as dramaturge. If theres one person who should be doing the work


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shopping of a play, it is the playwright. No play should go into rehearsal

until it is pretty close to being ready to open. No play should be subject to

being revised by directors, actors, producers and dramaturges, to do what?

To make the play easier on an audience, to make the play safer, to make

the play less troublesome. Most of the work shopping that takes place with

plays is for commercial reasons, not to improve the play in any fashion,

but to make the play more commercial. Thats what most work shopping

is about and thats why most dramaturges in the United States at least, are

hired, to make the plays safe and commercial. Thats not what art should

be about.

The whole notion, lets just say people are going to be performing one of

Beethovens string quartets, lets say theyre going to do the C-sharp

minor, opus 131 or 133, I dont remember. In rehearsal, the violist doesnt

suddenly just tap and say Guys, I dont like that b-flat. I know Beethoven

wrote a b-flat, but I dont like that whole page as a matter of fact. Were

inventive, were creative, lets do something different. Nobody gets away

with that with a Beethoven string quartet. Why people think they can get

away with the equivalent of doing that to a play I have absolutely no idea.

But a play is not considered to be as sacrosanct as a string quartet is.

Nobody goes around hanging paintings upside down in galleries, or

hanging two thirds of a painting. That people think they can perform two

thirds of a play and its preposterous. There is insufficient respect for the

creative act, and thats enormously troubling.

Audience: Do you work with young playwrights at all? Does their work change at all

based on advice you have given?

Edward Albee: I work with young playwrights a lot. I taught at the University of Houston

for fifteen years and chose my own students out of submission. Ive done

it all my creative life. I do occasionally make suggestions as to how I think


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if I understand what theyre after, how they can get there more efficiently

perhaps, but Im not going to tell them how to rewrite their work. My

interest in having them change their work would only be to its value for

what it is about, not to make the play safer, or more commercial or less

dangerous, or shorter or longer or anything, but make it closer to the

playwrights intention. I think the only person who can ultimately figure

that out is the playwright. So I can make suggestions as to how I think you

can get there or get a little closer to that. But I do hear playwrights being

encouraged to make their play safer or softer, and I worry about the craft

of playwriting.

I will tell you one more story, its going to take a couple of minutes, but

thats alright. When I went to the first day of rehearsal for Whos Afraid of

Virginia Woolf, a four character one set play, I walked into the rehearsal

room with my producer Dick Bark? And there 75 to 80 people in the

room, four character one set play. The actors of course, the actors

understudy, everybodys agent, all the designers and their assistants and

their agents. 75 people sitting in the room and I said, thats an awful lot of

people here. And my producer Dick Bark said something very important,

he said I dont want you to get a swelled head over this, but remember

one thing, yes there are 80 people sitting in this room, but they are here for

only one reason, you wrote a play. If playwrights could be encouraged to

remember that everyone is there because they wrote a play, we wouldnt

have all the terrible problems we have in the theatre of plays being cut to

shred and destroyed for commercial reasons. We are all there because

somebody wrote a play. Thats where the ballgame begins and where it

has to end.

Fiona Reid: Edward Albee, on behalf of postmenopausal actresses everywhere who

would not have careers were it not for your plays


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Edward Albee: Ive never heard it quite explained that way.

Fiona Reid: and on behalf of everyone in this theatre, I thank you for generously

sharing your time and talent with us.

Conversation Albee

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Transcript of Conversation Albee