EVERY SO OFTEN “something can happen that’s outside the rules, that doesn’t relate to The Way the Game Is Played,” Stevie concedes to her husband of 22 years in Edward Albee’s black comedy The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002), after Martin confesses to her that even though he continues to love her, he’s fallen in love with a goat. Her concession also sounds an ominous warning inasmuch as, before the play is over, Stevie will—with the fury of one of the avenging Eumenides mentioned in the play—kill the goat and dump its bloody carcass at her husband’s feet.
Similarly, in Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973), a teenage boy stands naked for hours in the dark, his face pressed against the “sweaty brow” of the horse on whom he climaxes during a surreptitious midnight ride, the naked teenager and horse reminding the boy’s therapist of “a necking couple.” Alan is being treated by Dr. Dysart for having blinded six horses, the chief of which had come to represent in the boy’s mind an all-seeing god who harshly judges the boy’s adolescent sexual impulses. Shaffer’s play concludes with the psychiatrist “sacrificing” the boy to “the god Normal,” ensuring that Alan will live an uneventful adult life in strict conformity with society’s expectations, never knowing real passion again.
The recent passing of gay playwrights Peter Shaffer (1926–2016) and Edward Albee (1928–2016) reminds us how vital a role theater has played in challenging late 20th-century social conventions regarding love and sexual desire. Both authors built their plays around moments that challenge audience members’ awareness of the way in which social games—the pursuit of success, the search for love, the performance of gender—are played. In the process, Shaffer and Albee radically altered theatrical conventions—that is, the way that theater games are played.
Although both Shaffer and Albee were relatively open about their homosexuality in their personal lives, they both resisted the label of “gay playwright,” Albee going so far as to revile it as a ghettoizing term. Curiously, though, their careers seemed to follow reverse trajectories in this respect. The action of Shaffer’s first play, Five Fingered Exercise (1958), is driven by a character’s repressed homosexual desire, but over the years Shaffer’s writing about homosexuality became increasingly oblique. Albee, on the other hand, dared to write openly about homosexual desire only toward the end of his long career, first in The Goat and later in Peter and Jerry (2004).
Edward Albee: All the Awful to Come
Albee burst upon the world stage in 1959 at age thirty with The Zoo Story, a one-act drama with two men whose encounter on a park bench on a quiet Sunday afternoon spirals into shocking violence that concludes with the death of one of them. Employing language that revealed ambivalent and often conflicting human emotions, the play dramatized the eruption of a vaguely sexual menace into the socially complacent existence of one of the men, resulting in the collapse of his carefully fashioned middle-class social façade. “What are you trying to do? Make sense out of things? Bring order?” the manic Jerry challenges the more reserved Peter at one point of the play. Jerry’s questions are directed to the audience as well. By refusing to guarantee the meaning of human existence through supplying a clear motive for Jerry’s taunting Peter into killing him, Albee forced his audience to make sense of a seemingly irrational encounter.
The success of The Zoo Story elevated the stature of the nascent Off-Broadway theater movement and had a galvanizing effect on younger playwrights. As John Guare notes, “we all wrote our own version of Zoo Story. Albee spawned an entire generation of park bench plays. … To show you were avant-garde, you needed no more than a dark room and a park bench.” It was not simply Albee’s minimalist setting and psychologically violent dialog and action but also his startlingly fresh vernacular that excited the aspiring playwrights. Peter and Jerry do not speak in polished sentences as characters do in the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, suggesting that every speaker’s thoughts are fully formed before he or she begins speaking. Rather, Albee delivers all-too-real misunderstandings and lapses in communication, emphasizing those powerful undercurrents that drive a conversation as one speaker circles around a forbidden topic, or as the topic that one wants to avoid rises suddenly to the surface. Albee’s characters struggle—and more often than not fail—to understand not only one another but also themselves.
Albee’s genius was confirmed by the arrival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in which, following a late night party, two couples meet for yet more drinks. Over the course of several hours they find their illusions stripped away, as those who initially seem the weaker individuals are revealed to be psychologically resilient, while those who first seem more self-assured are exposed as being vulnerable and insecure. Drawing upon Antonin Artaud’s manifesto for a theater of cruelty, Albee challenged the postwar American understanding of what makes for an authentic existence, daring the audience to recognize the fragility of contemporary society’s truce with the emptiness of existence. Bringing the Off-Broadway movement to Broadway, Albee was denied the Pulitzer Prize for Virginia Woolf by the daily critics, who found it unsettling and not spiritually uplifting. However, the 1966 film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, directed by Mike Nichols, would go on to win a slew of Oscars and other awards. While ostensibly about two straight couples, as critic David Bromage recalls, in the 1960s “playing ‘Get the Guest’ … as they do in Albee’s Virginia Woolf” was part of the gay “sensibility of the time.”
With A Delicate Balance in 1966, Albee would win the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes. The play explores the angst of Americans who rely upon alcohol or willful self-denial, and who immure themselves in upper-middle-class wealth and privilege, in order to silence their fears that their lives have no meaning. Stripping away the veneer of civilized behavior, the play covers much the same territory as that mapped out by his contemporary, short story writer John Cheever: the postwar mirage of suburban contentment. Ultimately, Albee is concerned with what, in The Goat, Stevie calls “all the awful to come”—the inevitable misfortune and failure that await even those who cling to this vision of the American Dream, feeling themselves exempt from life’s tragic comedy.
Ironically, although Albee insisted on people acknowledging the truth, no matter how painful it may be, the one topic he would not allow himself to write about for many years was his homosexuality. This reticence is possibly due to his having been attacked relatively early in his career—along with veteran playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge—by homophobic New York Times reviewers Howard Taubman and Stanley Kaufman, for writing “disguised” homosexual dramas in which the female characters were supposedly little more than homosexual men in drag. He often stated, even late in his career, that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “gay playwright” (as opposed to a playwright who happened to be gay), and he resisted readings of The Zoo Story as the dramatization of a gay pick-up gone wrong. He went so far as to take legal action to shut down an all-male production of Virginia Woolf, objecting that the campy performances limited the play’s universality.
His circumspection, however, was more likely a response to the homophobia of his mother, Frances Cotter Albee. Edward had been adopted as an infant by a wealthy, childless couple. Raised in tony Larchmont, New York, he attended—and was kicked out of—the best prep schools that his parents’ money could buy. At age nineteen he dropped out of college and moved to the more socially welcoming and artistically stimulating Greenwich Village, where he become a regular in the local gay bars. His early plays offer a devastating critique of the image of the American family popularized on 1950s TV sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. In The American Dream (1961), for example, a couple seeks to return their adopted child to the orphanage because he refuses to stop masturbating. They hope to turn him in for one who’ll conform to their expectations—an eerie echo of Albee’s strained relationship with his own adoptive parents. As biographer Mel Gussow reports, shortly before Frances Albee’s death in 1989, a close friend asked why she still refused to accept her son’s homosexuality. Frances not only declined to discuss the subject but shortly thereafter altered her will, canceling Edward’s inheritance. She may not have been able to return him to the orphanage from which he’d come, but even after her death she could impress upon him how much he had disappointed her.
Two years after her death, however, Albee was finally able to free himself of his mother’s contempt in Three Tall Women (1991), which focuses on an imperious woman who, even on her deathbed, further isolates herself emotionally by refusing to reconcile with her bisexual son, whom she had driven out of the house twenty years earlier. The play is a haunting attempt by Albee to understand the mother who refused to understand him. It also freed Albee to address homosexuality openly in his plays.
In The Goat, for example, Martin’s unconventional relationship with the title animal parallels his adolescent son Billy’s confusion regarding his growing erotic attraction to other males, including his own father. Defending the Dionysian mystery of sex, Martin asks—to the shock and disgust of his hopelessly conventional and judgmental friend, Ross: “Is there anything ‘we people’ don’t get off on? Is there anything anyone doesn’t get off on, whether we admit it or not—whether we know it or not? Remember Saint Sebastian with all the arrows shot into him? He probably came! God knows the faithful did! Shall I go on? You want to hear about the cross!?” Disgust with other peoples’ sexual behaviors, Albee argues, is the result of one’s own limited self-awareness. The Goat dares to speak openly of what people will not admit to others—or to themselves. Audience members who were outraged by The Goat were the same people who were outraged by the sadomasochistic images of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who was in the news at this time. What such people failed to recognize was how similar those images were to the homoerotic art that could be found in churches and museums, or in their own fantasies and dreams.
Albee is a great gay playwright not because he broke new ground in his plays for gay subject matter, as Mart Crowley did in The Boys in the Band (1968), but because he forced theater-goers to acknowledge the lies that postwar American society was built upon, including the lie of what we would call “heteronormativity.” In some of the most sharply etched and mordantly witty plays of the late 20th century, Albee challenged the popular American preference for frothy comedies and treacly melodramas by demonstrating the emptiness of the American Dream, including its heteronormative assumptions. Presenting Albee with the Lambda Lifetime Achievement Award, fellow playwright Terrence McNally noted that Albee’s modus operandi was to “grab your audience by the throat and shake hard. While shaking, make them laugh with a humor that takes no prisoners. Anyone and everything is fair game. Then, when limp, lift them up in an embrace of Olympian tenderness.” One can feel that Olympian tenderness as George helps Martha climb the stairs at the close of Virginia Woolf and as Martin embraces his sexually confused son Billy in The Goat. The illusions of conventional life have been destroyed, and it is time to start afresh.
Peter Shaffer: Bright Moments of Joy
Albee’s personal relationships are well documented. After leaving home at age nineteen and settling in Greenwich Village, he lived for ten years with composer William Flannagan, who was ten years Albee’s senior and whom Albee would inscribe in Virginia Woolf as Billy, the crazy telegram delivery man. According to biographer Mel Gussow, Albee also inscribed his next lover—future playwright Terrence McNally, who was ten years Albee’s junior—in the same play when Martha describes her imaginary son. And when his longtime partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2007, The New York Times—in a sign of how far it had come since printing the homophobic diatribes of Taubman and Kaufman forty years earlier—respectfully described his relationship with Albee.
In contrast, there is little on record to reveal Peter Shaffer’s private life (surprisingly, no biography yet exists), yet Shaffer was willing from the start of his career to write quite openly about homosexuality. Five Finger Exercise (1958) depicts an upper-middle-class household in which a young, spiritually dispossessed German tutor arouses the romantic longing of both an unhappily married woman and her sensitive, artistically inclined college-age son. Acting on his frustrated homosexual desire, the son betrays the guileless tutor, ensuring that the latter is exiled from the relatively comfortable family circle to which the tutor—ashamed of his own father’s Nazi past—yearns to belong. Likewise, in White Liars (1967) the gypsy fortune-teller in a dilapidated seaside resort shrewdly divines the sexual attraction that one of her musician customers feels for his band-mate.
Shaffer’s concern with the damage that results from the keeping of sexual secrets is closely related to his exasperation over why people refuse the call of joy—“not eternal joy, or even joy for a week,” as Julian Christoforu puts it in The Public Eye (1962), “but immediate, particular, bright little minutes of joy—which is all we ever get or should expect.” In each of the plays for which he is best known—The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Equus, Amadeus (1979), and Lettice and Lovage (1987)—a person in authority who leads a socially conventional and seemingly successful life is confronted by a figure of striking originality whose dæmonic creativity makes the establishment figure aware of the spiritual emptiness of his or her own existence. Rejecting the gritty “kitchen sink” play in vogue in the postwar period as well as the Method school of acting associated with Marlon Brando, Shaffer exuberantly exploited all of the resources of the theater (music, dance, mime, masks) to create an explosive experience for the audience, promoting a “total theater” driven by the search for a religious dimension in contemporary life deadened by crass materialism.
The big gestures made by Shaffer’s protagonists disclose a refusal to be contained by “the mere”—Shaffer’s term for the anemic existence suffered by timid conformists—as well as the indefatigability of the human imagination and the porousness of sexual categories. His extraordinary theater rituals forced the audience to exercise their imagination as, for example, they watched an army of conquistadors climbing the Andes in mime in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, or were hypnotized by the horse-like movements of six actors in velour track suits wearing wire-framed horses’ heads and hooves in Equus. Shaffer invited the audience to identify with the creative person: the Inca king about to be sacrificed by the Spanish conquerors, or the boy who’s poised to be “normalized” by his psychiatrist. He used theater to turn viewers’ expectations upside-down and inside-out, going so far in Black Comedy (1965) as to turn the stage lights on when party guests are forced to move about during a power outage, and off again when the apartment’s power has been restored. In the process he exposes social pretenses and reveals what people genuinely think and feel.
Toward the end of his career, in the radio play Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing? (1989), Shaffer created a middle-aged woman who takes pride in her accuracy as a typist, who escapes the “dowdiness in England” and the “dreariness” of her own life by accepting a job offer to serve as the personal secretary for a handsome young Hollywood film star. She’s devastated to discover that her romantic idol is involved in a sadomasochistic relationship with his bodyguard. The play re-enacts the plot of White Liars in which a secret homosexual liaison is uncovered, this time not by a worldly observer but by a naïve, easily shocked, highly judgmental middle-aged woman. But this time the gay male understands and happily satisfies his desire. It’s as though Shaffer is thumbing his nose at an audience that continues to be shocked by homosexual desire.
In 2006, New York magazine reported that Shaffer was “completing a play on Tchaikovsky” (who may have committed suicide when details of his private life were about to be exposed), which would undoubtedly have proven to be Shaffer’s most overt treatment of homosexuality and its connection to the creative process—an openly gay Amadeus. Possibly work was suspended due to Shaffer’s declining health, but possibly also because of the failure of major Broadway revivals of Equus and Amadeus, which he may have interpreted to mean that audiences were becoming so aware of the dynamics of sexual repression and expression that they no longer responded to his style of drama.
Changing the Rules of the Game
In a powerful rebuke to a friend who questioned his ability to write universal plays even though his homosexuality made him an outsider, Tennessee Williams replied: “I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my deviation. More conscious of need in others, and what power I have to express the human heart must be in large part due to this circumstance.” Similarly, it can be said that their identity as outsiders is what allowed both Albee and Shaffer to recognize the terror that lies behind the masks we wear to be accepted by society. This identity also enabled them to relish the nature of performance—whether the late-night games that George and Martha play or the midnight rituals with his beloved horses that Alan designs. “There is no such thing as naturalism in theatre,” Albee said in an interview with British critic Michael Coveney, “merely stages of stylization. The wonderful thing about theater is the total suspension of disbelief. Are we supposed to think that the actors are the people they say they are?”
By writing plays that call attention to the unreality of theater, Albee and Shaffer called attention to the inauthenticity of modern life: both how people are influenced by movies and commercials and how they fashion their sexuality to conform to socially celebrated norms. Relying heavily upon the conventions of Greek tragedy, plays like Albee’s The Goat and Shaffer’s Equus attempted to return theater to its ancient roots in which one wore a mask to deliver a primal authenticity that could not be enacted in everyday life.
Raymond-Jean Frontain recently edited the theater essays of playwright Terrence McNally.
