Editor’s Note: Edward Albee died on Friday, September 16th, 2016, at the age of 88. He passed away at his summer home in Montauk, New York, after a short illness. He was one of the most important and iconic American playwrights of the 20th century. He wrote some of the most memorable plays in the modern repertory, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which must have been performed on most of the world’s stages, and there cannot have been many actors who haven’t coveted one of his roles, whether in The Zoo Story, Three Tall Women, A Delicate Balance, or other more recent work like The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? (2002). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times and received numerous other honors and awards, such as the National Medal of Arts.
The author of this piece, Dimitris Yeros, is a Greek painter and photographer who was a friend of Albee’s for the last fifteen years of the playwright’s life. Albee wrote the preface for Yeros’ 2011 book Shades of Love. Here Yeros writes about the last time he met the playwright in his Manhattan home.
I HAD SEEN HIM again in the spring of 2010. It was another dull, rainy New York afternoon. That time, we had sat for quite a while in his large, stylish home, whose walls were filled with modern art, including a Chagall, a Kandinsky, a Lipchitz, and two Arps, while several dozen African wooden sculptures stood on the floor and watched us with expressionless eyes. There was also a beautiful white-and-beige-colored cat walking around nonchalantly, flirtatiously rubbing against our legs.
Over the years of our friendship, I had photographed him on a few occasions, and he had used some of my photographs for the covers of books and theater programs.
