FOR OVER FIVE DECADES, Edward Albee has been an enduring presence in American theater and one its most iconoclastic and divisive playwrights. His first off-Broadway one-act play, The Zoo Story (1959), catapulted Albee into critical recognition as a writer to watch out for. However, controversy would prove to be Albee’s long-time companion.
In 1962, his first Broadway play, the searing psychodrama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? handily kicked over what remained of “traditional” drama in the U.S. (The title was derived from something he fortuitously found scrawled in soap on a bathroom mirror in a New York bar.) The play’s Rabelaisian humor, raw language, and frank sexual themes inevitably provoked charges that it was anti-marriage and profane. Although the play was initially chosen for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize drama jury, some members of the advisory board protested—half would eventually resign—and the prize for Best Drama was withdrawn altogther that year. But the play did win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for best play, and it’s now considered one of the best dramas of the postwar era.
Albee describes his work as “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” His pet peeve is the self-perpetuating canard that the play is cryptically about gay relationships: “The bullshit that Virginia Woolf was about two male couples … every time some damn fool asks you the question because they’ve read it somewhere, you have to sigh and deny it again, they print your sigh and denial, and it perpetuates the falsehood,” he laments. “I don’t know why people don’t pay attention. When somebody’s told them something isn’t true, why don’t they just accept it? … I’m perfectly capable of writing gay characters if I wanted to. There are some gay people flitting around my plays from time to time. I think Butler in Tiny Alice is probably gay. Certainly Jack in Everything in the Garden is gay. … But I certainly wouldn’t put gay couples in a domestic scene on a university campus, which is one of the most conservative establishments imaginable. That would be ludicrous!”
Subsequently, Albee, along with Tennessee Williams and William Inge, would be dogged by allegations of forming a cabal to infiltrate a gay agenda into the American theater. Perhaps this explains Albee’s abiding sensitivity to the “g” word, which has sometimes put him at odds with the PC monitors. However, despite the critical flops (Tiny Alice, Malcolm, The Man With Three Arms, Lolita) and blatant homophobia on the part of some prominent reviewers, Albee had the last laugh, going on to win three Pulitzers—for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994)—more than any other playwright besides Eugene O’Neill. In 1996, he received the Kennedy Center’s National Medal of Arts.
In 2011, May 26, Albee was chosen a special honoree at the 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Pioneer Awards in New York City, meant to recognize those who have broken ground for LGBT literature and publishing. The award was presented by playwright Terrance McNally, who spoke in defense of his former lover: “He has so avoided gay subject matter throughout his career that people wonder if he’s gay. Well, I’m here to tell you he is. I picked him up at a party in 1960. I thought he was gorgeous and sexy.” McNally expanded on the subject of the “gay art police,” observing that although Albee has “received much criticism from his brethren” over his views about professional queerness, it is an artistic dead end “to limit oneself to one’s own sexual preference. … We don’t have to write as role models, but as individuals, and not just as a minority with an agenda. It’s a lessening of the creative act to limit oneself that way.” Albee later clarified: “Maybe I’m being a little troublesome about this, but so many writers who are gay are expected to behave like gay writers, and I find that is such a limitation and such a prejudicial thing that I fight it wherever I can.”
At 84, Albee is notoriously cagey during interviews, and enjoys a good game of cat-and-mouse, sometimes craftily switching roles with the interviewer. I spoke to the playwright shortly before the revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway on October 13th—fifty years to the day of its première—in a production previously staged by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater. Although Albee underwent open heart surgery in June, walks with a cane, and wears a hearing aid, he is still a good sparring partner, determined not to be categorized and pigeonholed, and can put even an admiring interlocutor through his paces. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a new play, with several more in the hopper.
Perhaps the most poignant development in Albee’s life these days is that, after his grieving period over losing his long-time companion of 35 years, Jonathan Thomas, he has a new love interest, a May-December relationship with a 24 year old artist. As he confessed in an October 8, 2012, profile for New York magazine, “For five years after Jonathan died, I didn’t want to do much of anything. I certainly didn’t think I’d be capable of ever caring much for anybody else or feeling amazing responses to things. But two and a half years ago now, I suddenly, one day, realized that I had fallen hopelessly in love. And really seriously, not just infatuation. Somebody not only beautiful and sexy but enormously talented, genuine, generous. I didn’t think I was going to do that anymore. It was joyous. ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘you’re capable of this still?’And at the same time, I realized a couple of problems. I mean, I am 84 now. … It wasn’t going to be a great, wonderful sexual relationship. But, wow, wasn’t that interesting when I thought it was! Isn’t kidding yourself fun? And so I am getting myself—not out of it … but out of concerning myself with it.”
Michael Ehrhardt: Does it feel like déjà vu all over again?
Edward Albee: You mean about Virginia Woolf? Not really; the fact of it opening on the exact date [of its debut]is somewhat questionable, when you take the matter of leap years into account. They will be opening on a Saturday night, the same way as the original did. I wish they weren’t, because I’ll have to wait until Monday for the reviews to come out. I don’t like the term “revival.” It sounds like something that needs resuscitation. The play is very much alive. This is a different version; I made some cuts that I thought were necessary. It’s the final version of three published versions. There’s the original version, there’s the first revised version, and the final one. Each one doesn’t change the nature of the play at all, but each one is a little shorter. This one is called the definitive version. And each production is very different; Pam [MacKinnon] did a great job. It’s a fine production, the cast is very good, and I’m very happy with it. People who haven’t seen the play before will see it afresh, and the people who have seen the play before will have another response. And everybody, depending on how old they’ve become since the last time they saw it, will have another response. No two people see the same play twice.
ME: More people probably know the play through the Taylor-Burton movie version.
EA: Sure. I originally wanted Bette Davis, and they promised me James Mason, for the [lead]parts.
ME: That would have been a bit meta, with Davis quoting herself in the first scene: “What a dump!” Is it true that James Mason wanted too much money?
EA: No, that’s bullshit, that’s not it at all. The perfectly simple reason is that Richard and Liz were getting married at the time, and the studio thought that it was a much more popular, more sensational choice. Taylor was twenty years too young for the part. She was brave, however, and I thought it was some of her best film work.
ME: I notice the play is titled Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as was Edward Albee’s Me, Myself & I, as well as Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. Is that a trend today, authors branding their work?
EA: You know why I did that? It’s not for any reason of self-aggrandizement, nothing of that sort. Writers may do it for different reasons; I just wanted to be sure that my name as the author is always placed above the title, as it should be. And at least in the same size as the title. I did it a long time ago.
ME: Tennessee Williams’ plays have been produced frequently these days, as well.
EA: Even the ones that don’t deserve it as much as others, unfortunately.
ME: Well, you must find it gratifying to be mounted so frequently in your own lifetime.
EA: Mounted?
ME: Your Lady from Dubuque was recently, uh—re-staged—to critical praise. Originally, it closed after only twelve performances.
EA: That always seems to be the case with my work. The critics back then weren’t comfortable with it, and there’s a new audience for it today. Before it was re-staged here, it was put on in London with Maggie Smith, in a fine production.
ME: Virginia Woolf caused quite a brouhaha when it first opened. Do you regret that the play may have lost some of its initial shock value over the last fifty years?
EA: A playwright can only portray what he sees in the world and hope that by setting it down honestly he can upset the audience enough so that there will be a change. It seemed very controversial at the time. Its language seemed far more violent than it was. I don’t write things merely to be shocking. I don’t change things because some people are offended. I just change things if the characters decide they would never want to say them.
ME: I’ve heard that they had to bring Elaine Stritch to play matinées because the role of Martha is so tough to play eight performances in a week.
EA: No, let’s get the story right. It was assumed by Uta [Hagen]’s agent when we hired her for the role, that the role was too grueling, and she couldn’t manage eight shows a week, so they—the producers—hired another cast without Uta’s knowledge. And when she heard this, she said, “I can do sixteen performances a week.” And, you know, she could have. She was a great actress.
ME: A few years ago I saw Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren in Strindberg’s Dance of Death, and couldn’t help thinking of George and Martha. Is there a parallel there?
EA: I’d say so. Strindberg was a great playwright.
ME: You take on the battle of the sexes, human self-delusion, and venality. Did it take you a long time to conceive and plot your themes, to incubate and work them out?
EA: I don’t begin with a thesis and pull in characters to fill that thesis. No, I write them to find out why I’m writing them. Look, every play you write demands everything you’ve realized in the time of your life up until the moment you’ve finished that play. That’s the only answer. If some things take less long than others, does that mean they’re less complicated? Not necessarily. I don’t revise. My plays usually take two months to get close to performing condition. I shorten them, if I’ve over-written. I don’t revise.
ME: So, do George and Martha, who have been called the most dysfunctional married couple since Jason and Medea, really love each other?
EA: If they didn’t, they’re too bright to stay together. They love each other in their own way. I don’t see why anybody would think George and Martha don’t love each other. Even if they constantly hurt each other. Yes, it’s called “communication.”
ME: You’re pretty much a sacred monster today. Your work is critic proof. You’ve certainly earned it.
EA: I certainly hope not. I don’t consider myself beyond criticism. That wouldn’t allow for accuracy from other people.
ME: I mean in the sense of, say, Jean Cocteau or Andy Warhol.
EA: Please don’t compare me to Warhol, that’s nonsense. Warhol is a terrible artist. And I don’t think of myself as a monster or, very frequently, sacred. I’m having fun. Isn’t this a gay magazine; can’t I have fun?
ME: On that note, do you believe there’s such a such a thing as a gay sensibility? I’m thinking of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank, Noel Coward, Joe Orton, Charles Ludlum, and Gore Vidal.
EA: Well, they were all intelligent and sophisticated; but can you explain exactly what a gay sensibility is? I think it’s a preposterous and absurd term.
ME: Well, as an Absurdist playwright…
EA: What do you mean by Absurdist?
ME: An Absurdist worldview is, well, it’s sort of a conundrum. Farce and tragedy, combined. It’s anti-naturalistic, and deals with the tragic senselessness of life in the face of death. You owe a debt to Ionesco and Beckett in that case.
EA: Sure, I owe a debt to everyone back to Sophocles. How do you define a gay sensibility?
ME: Well, a dual perspective on life. It involves a lot of things; aesthetic, spiritual, and sexual. It’s a particular way of seeing the world.
EA: Everyone has a particular way of seeing the world. No two people see anything the same. I think it’s a preposterous term.
ME: Then, let’s talk about a camp sensibility—
EA: I don’t talk about a camp sensibility much, since the definition of camp is being redefined every thirty minutes. Susan Sontag had one, other people have had others. I really dislike labels, for they’re all, after all, over-simplified and distorting. So, I don’t like them.
ME: When I say gay sensibility with regard to Wilde, I think of a sense of paradox and irony. For instance, his aphorisms: “I can resist anything but temptation.”
EA: Well, you can see paradox in almost everything. How is a gay sensibility different from a straight sensibility?
ME: It’s seeing things from an outsider’s point of view; a dual consciousness, an outsider’s view of accepted values. Wilde, a married Victorian homosexual, was forced to live a secret, a double life, which must have informed his sensibilities. I think “Earnest,” in which he skewers the upper classes, is a clear reaction to that.
EA: That was a long time ago. I don’t think people think about that much anymore. People aren’t forced to live that way now.
ME: Gore Vidal always rejected the terms of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” as inherently false. “We are all bisexual to begin with. That is a fact of our condition.” What’s your take on that?
EA: I don’t worry about it very much. I do what is natural to me. I knew I was gay when I was eleven. I live what is my nature, and don’t worry very much whether people like it or not, or what they think about it. Because if you think about all that stuff, you’re living somebody else’s life.
ME: OK, let’s talk sex. You and Terrance McNally were once lovers…
EA: Yes, we were, more than once.
ME: I would hope so. He was a mentor. Did he ever give you feedback when your writing a play?
EA: We don’t talk about each others’ work much. We’re friendly, very friendly, and if I didn’t like his work we wouldn’t be such friends.
ME: Gore Vidal was pretty much the last of the out-and-about elder statesmen, a playwright, a novelist, a political commentator—
EA: He was the last one, really? My goodness!
ME: Well, apart from you. One of the last. Were you acquainted; and what would you consider his contribution to American lit and polemics? I wish we had him around today.
EA: Yes, I knew Gore, and, well, he wasn’t much fun in the last few years of his life. I think when you get down to what his contribution really was, it wasn’t how witty he could be or his sense of irony. I think his most serious contribution to American literature was his historical fiction. It’s much more useful and valuable work than all the camp stuff.
ME: Well, he was considered America’s answer to Oscar Wilde.
EA: Why do people have to make such stupid comparisons?
ME: How does it strike you that in the 21st century there is still so much hostility towards gays by the Christian right?
EA: Well, that’s the nature of the so-called Christian right. How else do you expect them to behave? Are they reasonable people? No, of course not. So don’t be surprised.
ME: That’s why this election is so important.
EA: I think we’re in terrible trouble, morally, politically, and intellectually, in this country, and I’m desperately worried about it. I’m worried about the fact that I hear more right-wing Republicans say more than anything else: “We don’t want a nigger in the White House.”
ME: They say that in so many code words.
EA: Of course, they have an entire book of code words.
ME: At an Outwrite award ceremony, you created a small tsunami by castigating gay writers for ghettoizing themselves. Do you still get blow-back from that?
EA: Not quite enough.
ME: You’re particularly hard on The Boys in the Band.
EA: Well, I didn’t think it was a very good play. Richard Barr wanted to produce it, and I said I’d have nothing to do with it. I thought it was a loathsome play. I thought it was opportunistically untrue about the nature of gay life. My reaction to that play was it was bascially pejorative, because it lied more than it told the truth about gay relationships.
ME: What did you think about Angels in America?
EA: I thought it was a much better play. I didn’t feel the author [Tony Kushner] was desperately unhappy about being gay. And I think he’s a better writer, and a more useful writer.
ME: How’s your long-planned play about Garcia Lorca coming along?
EA: I’m still thinking about that. The Lorca family weren’t very happy with our conversations. They kept pointing out that Lorca was just like everybody else. Aside from that fact that he was a great writer, he was just like everybody else.
ME: Is it Martha who says: “I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor”? I beg to differ.
EA: “I have a sense of humor and the ridiculous.” No, I wasn’t talking about me. Martha is the one who says it in the play, I don’t. I’ve never quoted myself in any play of mine. I usually invent.
ME: You have quoted other people.
EA: Who have I quoted?
ME: George’s line: “flores por los muertos.”
EA: Yes, that’s from Tennessee’s Streetcar. Of course, that was intentional. Most people know that it’s a quote. When the play first came out, not everyone knew Streetcar, so a lot of people didn’t realize that I was quoting Tennessee, and they lost two-thirds of the joke.
ME: Will you ever revisit Easter Island?
EA: I’ve got to get back there. I was only there a week, but I want to live there for a month. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I’ve got a play now that’s going to be set on Easter Island.
ME: I’m glad to see you on the mend.
EA: I am on the mend. My mind has collapsed, but aside from that I’m doing well.
