Edward Albee was an American playwright known for his absurdist plays, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He was adopted by Reed A. Albee, son of Edward Franklin Albee II, who owned vaudeville houses and introduced film to the US. Albee honed his craft in Greenwich Village and won numerous awards for his plays, including three Pulitzer Prizes. He continued to write throughout his life, with his most recent play being Me, Myself, and I in 2007.
Edward Albee is an American playwright, best known for his plays Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Sandbox and The Zoo Story. He was born in 1928 in Virginia and in his over eighty years he wrote more than thirty plays and won virtually every major award bestowed on a playwright.
Albee was adopted at the age of a few weeks, taken in by Reed A. Albee, who christened young Edward Albee after his father, Edward Franklin Albee II, who owned many various vaudeville houses around the country. Edward Franklin Albee II was, in fact, the first person to introduce film to the United States, and in the process made a fortune and a theater empire, which he passed on to his son. Reed Albee, in turn, was a great actor in the world of theater, and it was in this world that young Edward Albee grew up.
He went through a number of schools in his young life, eventually being expelled from Lawrenceville School and sent to the military academy in Pennsylvania. He attended Trinity College in Connecticut before being expelled for failing to attend chapel and a number of classes. For the next decade, Albee honed his craft, moving to Greenwich Village and taking a variety of odd jobs, including delivery boy for Western Union and record salesman. In 1958 he produced his first play, The Zoo Story, in Berlin.
The Zoo Story laid the foundation for Edward Albee and his work, which he would continue to build on for decades. In many ways, Edward Albee can be considered the first truly mainstream Surrealist of American theatre. His work has a level of the absurd about it, always lingering just beneath the surface, that would go on to influence a whole developing generation of playwrights. While often hailed as the philosophical successor to great American playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams, in many ways he grew more out of the tradition of Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett, Europeans who also tended to paint a veneer of normality over fundamentally absurd.
From the moment Albee won the Drama Desk Award for The Zoo Story, his place in American theater was certain. The following year, 1959, he wrote three more plays, The Sandbox, The Death of Bessie Smith and Fam and Yam, and in 1961 he wrote what is perhaps his most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which he wrote won his first Tony Award for Best Comedy. In 1967 he won his first Pulitzer Prize, for A Delicate Balance, followed shortly by another Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Seascape, and finally in 1994 for Three Tall Women. In 2002 he won another Tony Award for The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, and in 2005 he received a special Tony for his lifetime achievement.
Edward Albee continued to write steadily throughout his life and in 2004 wrote a first act for his first play, The Zoo Story, called Homelife. The combination of the two acts is called Peter & Jerry and has been met with widespread acclaim. Most recently, in 2007 he wrote Me, Myself, and I at the age of 79.
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