Edward Albee

Edward Albee born 12 March 1928

Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee was born in Washington, DC and was adopted two weeks later and taken to Westchester County, New York. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, himself the son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theatres, where Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother was Reed's third wife, Frances. Albee left home when he was in his late teens, later saying in an interview, 'They weren't very good at being parents, and I wasn't very good at being a son.'

For a handful of years, he seemed to be the heir to the late Eugene O'Neill and to Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, who had, by the early 1960s, lost their winning streaks. However, Albee was something of a has-been by the mid-1960s.

Unlike his predecessors, Albee had his early success off-Broadway with a series of one-act plays, The Zoo Story (1958), The American Dream (1960), and The Death of Bessie Smith (1961). His first full-length play was the controversial three-and-a-half-hour Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1963), his first Broadway hit.

During the ensuing years, Albee alternated increasingly 'arid' original plays with adaptations of stories and novels by contemporaries like Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe [1964]) and James Purdy (Malcolm [1966]).

By 1970, Albee was a forgotten playwright whose later plays, The Lady from Dubuque (1980), Lolita (1981), and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983), hold places only in the pantheon of major Broadway disasters.

In 1991, however, Albee had a major success with Three Tall Women, a play whose central character is a dying woman who has spurned her gay son. In 2001, Albee's The Goat or Who Is Sylvia, a tale of taboo love, which may be a parable about homosexuality, won the Tony Award for Best Play.

Albee's place in the history of gay drama is as ambiguous. His early off-Broadway work was, for its time, daring in his mention of homosexuality and its implied homoeroticism.

Yet Albee's homosexuality and the gay subtext of his early work came to haunt him. Some heterosexist critics, angered by Albee's scathing picture of modern marriage in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, insisted that George and Martha, the feuding central couple in the play, had to be a crypto-gay couple (by this logic The Taming of a Shrew is a crypto-gay play) or that the play was an act of homosexual spite. By this time, leading New York critics were becoming increasingly hostile toward the more openly gay work of Williams, William Inge, and Albee.

When Albee's allegorical Tiny Alice, in which a cardinal and a lawyer are bickering ex-lovers, opened in 1964, critics attacked furiously. Phillip Roth lambasted the play's 'ghastly pansy rhetoric'.

A member of the Dramatists Guild Council, Albee has received three Pulitzer Prizes for drama — for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1974), Three Tall Women (1990-1991); a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996).

Albee is the President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., which maintains the William Flanagan Creative Persons Center (a writers and artists colony in Montauk, NY).

He is finally acknowledged as 'America's greatest living playwright.'

Albee's longtime partner, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died on May 2, 2005, the result of a two year-long battle with bladder cancer.

In 2008, in celebration of his eightieth birthday, numerous Albee plays were mounted in distinguished Off Broadway venues, including the historic Cherry Lane Theatre, where the playwright himself is directing two of his one-acts, The American Dream and The Sandbox, which were produced at the theatre in 1961 and 1962, respectively.