Edward Albee, 1928 - A Descriptive
Chronology of His Plays, Excerpted with additions and other modifications from Charles A. Carpenter's Modern British, Irish, and American Drama: A Descriptive Chronology, 1865-1965. For an explanation of principles and limitations, click on Introduction above. A selective bibliography of books by and about the dramatist is appended. |
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1928
March
On March 12 a boy is born to Louise Harvey and named Edward; the father had
abandoned the family and the baby is put up for adoption. In February 1929
he is adopted by the head of the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theatres,
Reed A. Albee, and his wife, who were childless. He is given the name Edward
Franklin Albee III. (The surname is pronounced All-bee, not Al-bee.)
1946
May
Edward Albee's first published play (written in 1945), Schism, appears
in the Choate Literary Magazine.
The long, humorless one-act satirizes constricting Catholic attitudes through
a grim pair of Irish rebels, using a heavy brogue. In the same year he wrote
another one-act, Each in His Own Way, that treats music and morality
in Nazi-occupied Poland by showing a dedicated piano teacher trying to keep
the spirit of Chopin alive as Germany destroys his country. He will write
his first serious attempt at full-length drama, The City of People,
in 1949. This depicts a magnetic but domineering professor who controls his
assistant, his students, and his son (a “Byronesque blond, perfect but
lame”). The son finally escapes with his new beloved, seeking “freedom
instead of security.” The latter plays remain unpublished.
1958
August
After Albee receives a tepid response from William Inge about a draft of The
Zoo Story and pays a visit to the "hot" Broadway dramatist, he writes
a dramatic sketch comically satirizing the encounter, Fam and Yam.
The brief dialogue is set in a room closely resembling Inge's apartment, and
features a budding playwright interviewing an established one. Fam laps up
Yam's sarcastic comments about "hit-happy" producers and overbearing critics,
but shows no interest in his effort to infiltrate Off-Broadway with his script,
"Dilemma, Dereliction and Death." The play is published in the September 1960
issue of Harper's Bazaar (and staged in Westport, CT); Inge is indignant
and tells a friend, "God, what a smug little creature he must be, to write
as though perfectly assured about his own future prestige." By this time Inge's
career is beginning its downhill slide just as Albee's is about to vault uphill.
1960
January
In tandem with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Edward Albee's long one-act,
The Zoo Story, is presented at the Provincetown Playhouse after its
well-received German-language world premiere in Berlin four months before.
The double bill enjoys a run of 532 and establishes Albee as a force to be
reckoned with in American drama. A rehearsed reading in the fall of 1959 at
Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio with nearly 100 people present had been greeted
querulously despite Norman Mailer's assertion, "I'm surprised no one has said
what a marvelous play this is. That's the best fucking one-act play I've ever
seen." The ultimate producer, Richard Barr, later recalls his experience reading
what he realized was the best one-act ever written by an American, and spending
his last $250 to take what turned out to be a very lucrative option on it.
After the play's controversial reception, he sends a photograph of Albee with
"the surly, angry young man look" to media outlets, imprinting his image on
the public of an American John Osborne. In fact, after the August premiere
in London, Tom Stoppard will comment that it was The Zoo Story even
more than Look Back in Anger that prompted him to try playwriting.
From the perspective of 1994 John Guare will say, "You can't imagine the debt
that every American playwright writing after 1960 owes to Edward Albee."
Although laced with prominent absurdist elements, mostly arising from the chief character's nihilistic world-view and his ways of communicating, The Zoo Story is essentially a humanistic morality play. In her 1969 pamphlet on Albee, Ruby Cohn invents an elegant pun, "Albeegory," and applies it to this play as well as others by him. The protagonist, a "permanent transient" at his wit's end, has set out on a definite mission because of his inability to make human contact—much less find love---in a universe on which "God turned his back . . . some time ago." He has sought animal contact at the zoo (in Central Park, New York), and has found no more than the mixture of suspicion and "feigned indifference" that he encounters everywhere. In desperation he concocts (or intuits) a fantasy: he will forcibly make the closest kind of contact imaginable with a human being and die in the act. He elbows his way into the consciousness of a normal, pedestrian businessman and irritates him with prying questions about his personal life (trying to discover if there is a genuine creature of feelings, "an animal man," behind the protective facade). He preaches a sermon, baffling to the man, about his adventures with his landlady's vicious dog, which not only reveals how the "other half" has to live but also contains a lesson that his subsequent actions embody: "neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves," but "the two combined" are "the teaching emotion. And what is gained is loss." Then he cruelly torments his victim into the absurd act of defending his park bench, and throws him his knife to use. After impaling himself upon it, he kindly tells him he is "an animal man" after all, wipes off the incriminating fingerprints, and dies, ironically echoing the man's cries of "Oh my God." Albee will tell friends and interviewers that this is his very first play, but he later admits that in the previous decade he had written a dozen or so "jejune" pieces.
February
In an interview in the New York Post, Albee reveals that he is working
on a full-length play "about two faculty members and their wives" entitled
Exorcism. In November he tells a friend that he is halfway through, but
he will not finish the play until January 1962. By then it is called Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
1961
January
Albee's absurdist one-act The American Dream is presented at the York
Playhouse and attains a run of 372. The play is directly indebted to Ionesco's
The Bald Soprano, although nonsense and non sequiturs are somewhat
less prevalent and a degree of sympathy for the elderly leaks through. It
features a purely materialistic Mommy, Daddy, and Young Man reacting to a
doddering but feisty Grandma, plus a lady from the Bye-Bye Adoption Service
who teams with Grandma to engineer a happy ending: the old lady leaves the
house (metaphorically dying of her own volition) and the surrogate son, "The
American Dream," moves in. In a brief preface—taking
the play more seriously than most people will—Albee
calls it "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." He adds, "Is the play offensive? I certainly
hope so; it was my intention to offend—as
well as amuse and entertain." A fourteen-minute spinoff of the play written
while it was still in process, The Sandbox, was first produced at the
Jazz Gallery in Manhattan in April 1960 and becomes a popular favorite among
college and little theatre groups. Albee looks back on it as "an absolutely
beautiful, lovely, perfect play."
March
Albee's moving short play The Death of Bessie Smith joins The American
Dream at the York Playhouse, after a German-language premiere in Berlin
in April 1960. It remains his only play involving a well-known historical
incident, the death of the great Negro blues singer Bessie Smith as a result
of her not being admitted to a Tennessee hospital for whites only. But it
is less a drama of protest than a naturalistic exploration of "people trapped
in the skin of their environment and people trapped in the environment of
their skin," complete with a victim of these forces. The play focuses on the
relationship between an intolerant nurse and a liberal intern who loves her
in spite of himself, and is therefore ineffectual in what he perceives as
the critical moment, when the singer is brought from the first hospital that
refused her to theirs. Ironically, the crisis has past: Bessie has already
died. Episodic and somewhat loose in structure, the play does not measure
up to Albee's previous one-acts, although it is revived frequently in the
"decade of protest" that follows.
Looking back on his first three plays, Albee tells his biographer, Mel Gussow, that The Death of Bessie Smith is "enormously different from both The Zoo Story and The American Dream, but that was the manner in which that play had to be written. Take those three plays: Zoo Story, totally naturalistic, aside from some elevated prose; Bessie Smith, a kind of Brechtian structure; and American Dream, French, Ionesco, avant-garde, absurdist. So who is the author of those three and why are they so different? Simply, that is the way each of those plays had to be written. Whenever I start thinking about a play, I start getting ideas about its style. Form and content co-determine each other. I have a sense of how naturalistic or stylized a play is going to be probably even before I've written a word of it."
1962
February
In a New York Times Magazine piece entitled "Which Theatre Is the Absurd
One?," Albee responds to the label "Theatre of the Absurd" which Martin Esslin
had recently assigned to his plays. He defines the form as "an absorption-in-art
of certain existentialist and post-existentialist philosophical concepts having
to do, in the main, with man's attempts to make sense for himself out of his
senseless position in a world which makes no sense—which
makes no sense because the moral, religious, political, and social structures
man has erected to 'illusion' himself have collapsed." Absurdist plays are
also "free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny."
He turns a paradox in contrasting avant-garde theatre with Broadway, where
profit is the measure of quality: "I would submit that The Theatre of the
Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contemporary theatre, facing as
it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and
that the supposed Realistic theatre—the
term used here to mean most of what is done on Broadway—in
the sense that it panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance
and presents a false picture of ourselves to ourselves, is, with an occasional
very lovely exception, really and truly The Theatre of the Absurd."
October
Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is staged on Broadway, enjoys
a run of 644, and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award by one vote
over Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Reviewers' judgments
range from Robert Coleman's "a sick play for sick people" to Richard Watts's
"the most shattering drama . . . since O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into
Night." The play is nominated for the Pulitzer by John Mason Brown and
John Gassner, but rejected by the advisory board of journalists, causing Brown
and Gassner to resign. A major factor in the rejection is filthy language,
even though Albee had deleted the most vile expletives for the production.
(He restores them for the 1976 revival, and comments that "nobody knew the
difference.")
As a grim naturalistic drama on the order of Strindberg's Dance of Death, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has much in common with O'Neill's greatest play (which Albee greatly admired). Not only does it compel spectators to experience well over three hours of excoriating verbal conflict between just four principal characters, but the interchanges focus relentlessly on damaging illusions and the realities they conceal. The unities of place and time intensify the spectacle of "higher animals" locked in love / hate relationships and engaged in a struggle for survival of their self-respect. However, Albee's drama does not share the naturalistic view of life so rigidly applied in O'Neill's. His acidly eloquent history professor exults over the "glorious variety and unpredictability" of people and events, and treats the young biologist as an enemy intent on engendering the society of Huxley's Brave New World. O'Neill shows the past regaining destructive control over the present, with the protagonist immersed in dope-dreams worse than ever before; Albee "kills" the most damaging illusion and leaves the older couple with a new basis for "communion" and the younger pair with heightened understanding (shared by attentive spectators who were also compelled to stay). If the play is a virtual Long Night's Journey Into Day, it is largely because the destructive forces are self-created delusions that can be, and are, exorcised. The central delusion, the imaginary son, was dreamed up to cement a disintegrating marriage but evolved into the chief weapon in the "total war" between the main combatants. The revelation that no son ever existed moves the play to the brink of fantasy and constitutes a surprise that is hard for playgoers and critics to swallow on first exposure. But it is dramatized with such verisimilitude and integrated so skillfully as the heart of another "Albeegory" that it has come to be perceived as the key to a powerful humanistic depiction of real life. With A Delicate Balance (1966), the play remains the secure foundation of Albee's high reputation as a dramatist.
In a Summer 1966 interview ("The Art of the Theater," Paris Review), Albee discusses the problematic element of the imaginary son at length. He blames the conditioning of spectators, "trained so much in pure, realistic theater," for the inabilility of some to detect "what actually is beneath the naturalistic overlay" and to notice "how early the unnaturalistic base had been set." They must also be willing to believe that "a highly educated, sensitive and intelligent couple, who were terribly good at playing reality and fantasy games," could "create a realistic symbol for themselves. To use as they saw fit." When the non-existent son becomes "a weapon they use in every one of their arguments" and George realizes it must be exorcised, "the loss is doubly poignant. Because they are not deluded people." Thus he doesn't think that the play "veers off into a less naturalistic manner at all"; "When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically."
1963
Summer
In an interview in Transatlantic Review, Albee comments on current
trends in serious drama: "I think we're moving away from a naturalistic base,"
especially from the misuse of the techniques of Ibsen and Chekhov which is
taken for "the naturalistic tradition of theater." "Reality isn't as simple
as it used to be and I suspect that the theater, the adventurous, the new
. . . theater in the United States, is going to concern itself with the revaluation
of the nature of reality and therefore, it's going to move away from the naturalistic
tradition." In the thirties "we were "gullible, naive, and we also did not
have at that point, potential for destroying ourselves quite so efficiently
as we have now. The existentialist and post-existentialist revaluation of
the nature of reality and what everything is about in man's position to it
came shortly after the 2nd World War. I don't think that it is an accident
that it gained the importance in writers' minds that it has now as a result
of the bomb at Hiroshima. We developed the possibility of destroying ourselves
totally and completely in a second. The ideals, the totems, the panaceas don't
work much anymore and the whole concept of absurdity is a great deal less
absurd now than it was before."
October
Albee's adaptation of Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café is
staged for fifteen weeks.
1964
December
Albee's second full-length drama, Tiny Alice, is staged on Broadway
and manages to run for 21 weeks. Written in August and September, the play
proves so radically different from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
that it jolts critical expectations and baffles spectators. A panel discussion
on the play is held in January 1965, and Albee comments, "It is the very simplicity
of the play . . . that has confused so many. It is, of course, neither a straight
psychological study nor a philosophical tract, but something of a metaphysical
dream play." His advice: "Sit back, let it happen to you, and take it in as
you would a piece of music or a dream." Like Strindberg's dream plays, Tiny
Alice has a conspicuous symbolic dimension. The five characters all have
emblematic names: three are designated by their occupations—Lawyer,
Cardinal, and Butler—and
two by first names that unfold their meaning as the play proceeds—Julian,
who evokes Julian the Apostate and becomes one, and Alice, who finally embodies
the Greek meaning of her name, alethia or truth. Lawyer represents
Alice in a deal to give Cardinal a huge grant to his church in return for
sending his private secretary, the lay brother Julian, to make the arrangements
at her mansion (managed by Butler). A huge model of the mansion, complete
to the last detail, is in the library; in Act II a fire breaks out in the
model's chapel, signaling that one has started in the real chapel, and in
Act III everyone, including Alice, drinks to a tiny version of her in the
model. The tangible Alice has transformed herself from an ugly old crone to
a seductive woman before Julian's eyes in order to seduce him away from the
church, a metaphor for ridding himself of religious delusions and accepting
the sensuous reality that pervades his dreams. They marry, and at the consummation
she cries, "He will be yours, Alice!"; after being ostracized by her he tries
to leave and is shot by Lawyer, and Alice pleads with the "real" Alice to
"take him in." His dying aria (a nine-minute monologue) expresses a prolonged
agony during which he realizes that his God has forsaken him and finally accepts
his new god, Alice or truth. Albee speaks graphically of the meaning and effects
of the enigmatic finale: "In a semi-coma, [Julian] begins to call to Alice-God,
as he is dying. He begins to hear a heavy breathing, sees one or two lights
moving, going on and off in the model. The breathing is slow and enormous,
filling the theatre. A great shadow begins to fall across the stage, the true
Alice, enormous, transferable. Julian dies, accepting the existence, accepting
his crucifixion." What he is left with is "pure abstraction—whatever
it be called: God, or Alice—and
in the end, according to your faith, one of two things happen: either the
abstraction . . . is proved real, or the dying man, in the last necessary
effort of self-delusion creates and believes in what he knows does not exist."
1965
September
Tennessee Williams declares in an interview that among older playwrights he
rates Beckett most highly, and among the younger ones, Albee. "I've never
seen any play of his that I didn't think was absolutely thrilling. He is truly
a major playwright, America's major playwright" (in Gruen, Close-Up).
1966
Summer
In the Paris Review interview, Albee relates his long involvement with
serious music to his plays: "I sense that there is a relationship—at
least in my own work—between
a dramatic structure, the form and sound and shape of a play, and the equivalent
structure in music." (In December 1984 he will add that Beckett, Pinter, and
himself "are the three playwrights who write, I think, with the closest understanding
of the relationship between the two structures" [in Conversations].)
Asked which dramatists he admires most, he responds: "The one living playwright
I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett." Others whose
works he especially admires are Brecht, Genet, Williams, and Pinter.
September
Albee’s A Delicate Balance is presented at the Martin Beck
Theater, enjoys a run of 132, and wins the Pulitzer.
1967
November
Albee's rendition of the recent English play by Giles Cooper, Everything
in the Garden, manages a run of only 84.
1968
March
Albee's tandem of short plays, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,
is presented at the Billy Rose Theater.
1971
March
Albee's All Over is presented at the Martin Beck Theater.
1975
January
Albee's Seascape is presented at the Shubert Theater and closes early,
but wins the Pulitzer.
1977
January
Albee's short plays Counting the Ways and Listening are staged
at the Hartford Stage Company.
1980
January
Albee's The Lady from Dubuque is staged, but lasts only 12 performances.
1983
April
Albee's The Man Who Had Three Arms is staged and severely panned, resulting
in a run of only 16.
1985
February
In an interview with Matthew C. Roudané published in Critical Essays on
Edward Albee, the dramatist sums up some of his basic convictions about
drama and theatre. The "ideal audience" he would prefer is one that "brings
to the theater some of the same attention and work that I do when I write
a play." Spectators should approach the theatre "in a state of innocence,
sober, without preconceptions, and willing to participate; . . . if they're
willing to have their consciousness raised, their values questioned—or
reaffirmed; if they are willing to understand that the theater is a live and
dangerous experience—and
therefore a life-giving force—then
perhaps they are approaching the theater in an ideal state." He describes
himself as "a kind of demonic social critic" in his plays: "I am concerned
with altering people's perceptions, altering the status quo. All serious art
interests itself in this. The self, the society should be altered by a good
play. All plays in their essence are indirectly political in that they make
people question the values that move them to make various parochial, social,
and political decisions. . . . Plays should be relentless; the playwright
shouldn't let people off the hook. He should examine their lives and keep
hammering away at the fact that some people are not fully participating in
their lives and therefore they're not participating with great intelligence
in politics, in social intercourse, in aesthetics. It's something I dearly
hope runs through all of my plays." This conviction underlies his denial that
he is a pessimist or nihilist:" If I were a pessimist I wouldn't bother to
write. Writing itself, taking the trouble, communicating with your fellow
human being is valuable, that's an act of optimism. There's a positive force
within the struggle. Serious plays are unpleasant in one way or another, and
my plays examine people who are not living their lives fully, dangerously,
properly."
1994
April
Albee's Three Tall Women is staged Off-Off-Broadway for a month, then
Off-Broadway for a run of 582. It wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award
and the Pulitzer.
Selective Bibliography of Edward Albee
The entire bibliography is largely restricted to readily available books and parts of books. The primary works are limited to the most essential from a scholarly viewpoint; secondary works are chosen less selectively, with an eye to the evolution of commentary as well as to quality and uniqueness. The books and parts of books are listed as follows: works by; reference works; collections of essays; biographical and critical works.
For a much fuller listing, including articles, essays in collections listed below, and material of foreign origin, consult bibliographies of the author plus:
Charles A. Carpenter. Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1966-1980: An International Bibliography and Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1981-1990: An International Bibliography. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1986, 1997
For more recent items, see the annual checklists of modern drama criticism from 1992 to 1999 in the journal Modern Drama, standard indexes of books and journals, and online resources such as WorldCat, Books in Print, MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures, Annual Bibliography of English Language Language and Literature, Academic Search Premier, Article First (FirstSearch), International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ), Google Scholar—Advanced Scholar Search, and the catalogs of university libraries and the Library of Congress.
[UP = University Press; Univ. = University; NY = New York]
Essential Volumes of Albee’s Writings and Statements
The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Volume I: 1958-65. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Duckworth, 2004; The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Volume 2: 1966-77. NY: Overlook, 2005
The Plays. 3 vols. NY: Macmillan, 1991
Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee, 1960 to 2005. NY: Carroll & Graf, 2005
Conversations with Edward Albee. Ed. Philip C. Kolin. Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 1988 (27 interviews, many elusive)
Selective List of Books and Parts of Books About Albee’s Life and Drama
I. Bibliographic and Reference Works
Amacher, Richard E., and Margaret Rule. Edward Albee at Home and Abroad: A Bibliography. NY: AMS Press, 1973 (Virtually useless now)
Giantvalley, Scott. Edward Albee: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987 (Thorough annotated bibliography)
Green, Charles L. Edward Albee: An Annotated Bibliography 1968-1977. NY: AMS Press, 1980
Horn, Barbara L. Edward Albee: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003 (Annotated secondary bibliography, 209-304)
King, Kimball. Ten Modern American Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography. NY: Garland, 1982, 1-108
Konkle, Lincoln. “Edward Albee.” Pp. 3-26 in Christopher J. Wheatley, ed. Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Fourth Series. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002
Paolucci, Anne, and Henry Paolucci. “Edward Albee.” Pp. 3-47 in Matthew C. Roudané, ed. American Dramatists. Detroit: Gale, 1989 (Bibliographical essay)
Tyce, Richard. Edward Albee: A Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986 (Far inferior to Giantvalley’s volume)
II. Collections of Essays (The separate essays are not analyzed in section III)
Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975
Bloom, Harold, ed. Edward Albee: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea, 1987
Bottoms, Stephen J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005
Edward Albee: Interview and Essays. Ed. Julian N. Wasserman et al. Houston, TX: Univ. of St. Thomas, 1983
Edward Albee: Planned Wilderness: Interview, Essays, and Bibliography. Ed. Patricia De La Fuente et al. Edinburg, TX: School of Humanities, Pan American Univ., 1980
Kolin, Philip C., and J. Madison Davis, eds. Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986
Mann, Bruce J., ed. Edward Albee: A Casebook. NY: Routledge, 2003
III. Biographical and Critical Works
Abbott, Anthony S. The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in
Modern Drama. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1989, 171-185
Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. Rev. ed. NY: Twayne, 1982
Baxandall, Lee. “The Theatre of Edward Albee.” Pp. 80-98 in Alvin B. Kernan, ed. The Modern American Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967
Bernstein, Samuel J. The Strands Entwined: A New Direction in American Drama. Boston; Northeastern UP, 1980, 113-135: “Seascape by Edward Albee”
Bigsby, C. W. E. Albee. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969
-----. Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1968, 71-92 (Stresses Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
-----. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, II. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984, 249-329: “Edward Albee”; condensed and updated in his Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 126-151: “Edward Albee: Journey to Apocalypse”
-----. “Edward Albee.” Pp. 44-51 in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 7: Prose Writing 1940-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999
Blum, Harold P. “A Psychoanalytic View of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.” Pp. 271-283 in Joseph T. Coltrera, ed. Lives, Events, and Other Players: Directions in Psychobiography. NY: Aronson, 1981
Bordewijk, C. “Simultaneity or Separation: Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Stage and Screen.” Pp. 111-126 in Gilbert Debusscher et al., eds. New Essays on American Drama. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989 (Costerus 76)
Bottoms, Stephen J. Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000
Brownstein, Oscar L. Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form.
NY: Greenwood Press, 1991, 25-51, 111-137
Brustein, Robert. Seasons of Discontent: Dramatic Opinions 1959-1965. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1965, see index; see also his The Third Theatre. NY: Knopf, 1969, 79-90 (Reprinted reviews)
Choudhuri, A. D. The Face of Illusion in American Drama. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979, 129-143: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Death of an Illusion”
Cohn, Ruby. Dialogue in American Drama. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971, 130-169: “The Verbal Murders of Edward Albee”
-----. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969 (48 pp.)
Cornut-Gentile, Chantal. “Who’s Afraid of the Femme Fatale in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Exposure and Implications of a Myth.” Pp. 371-385 in Cornut-Gentile and José A. García Landa, eds. Gender, I-Deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996 (The novel and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
Davis, Walter A. Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1994, 209-262: “The Academic Festival Overture: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Debusscher, Gilbert. Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal. Brussels: Center for American Studies, 1967 (94 pp.)
Ditsky, John. The Onstage Christ: Studies in the Persistence of a Theme. London: Vision Press, 1980, 147-156: “Albee’s Parabolic Christ: The Zoo Story”
Dutton, Richard. Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee and Storey. London: Macmillan, 1982, 113-124 (On Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
Egri, Péter. “American Variations on a British Theme: Giles Cooper and Edward Albee.” Pp. 135-151 in Ann Massa and Alistair Stead, eds. Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. London: Longman, 1994 (On Everything in the Garden)
Gassner, John. Dramatic Soundings: Evaluations and Retractions Culled from 30 Years of Dramatic Criticism. Ed. Glenn Loney. NY: Crown, 1968, 591-607 and see index
Geis, Deborah R. “Staging Hypereloquence: Edward Albee and the Monologic Voice.” Pp. 1-8 in Norma Jenckes, ed. New Readings in American Drama: Something’s Happening Here. NY: Lang, 2002
Glenn, Jules. “The Adoption Theme in Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice and The American Dream.” Pp. 255-269 in Joseph T. Coltrera, ed. Lives, Events, and Other Players: Directions in Psychobiography. NY: Aronson, 1981
Gottfried, Martin. A Theater Divided: The Postwar American Stage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966, 264-274 (Provocative critical view)
Guha Majumdar, Rupendra. Central Man: The Paradox of Heroism in Modern American Drama. Brussels: Lang, 2003, 233-247: “Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey: A Biography. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999
Halperen, Max. “What Happens in Who’s Afraid ... ?” Pp. 129-143 in William E. Taylor, ed. Modern American Drama: Essays in Criticism. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1968
Hayman, Ronald. Edward Albee. NY: Ungar, 1973
-----. Theatre and Anti-Theatre: New Movements Since Beckett. NY: Oxford UP, 1979, 147-163
Heldreth, Leonard G. “From Reality to Fantasy: Displacement and Death in Albee’s Zoo Story.” Pp 19-28 in Michele K. Langford, ed. Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990
Hilfer, Anthony C. “George and Martha: Sad, Sad, Sad.” Pp. 119-139 in Thomas B. Whitbread, ed. Seven Contemporary Authors. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1966
Hill, Linda M. Language as Aggression: Studies in the Postwar Drama. Bonn: Bouvier, 1976, 38-60: “Language and Society: Albee’s The American Dream”
Hirsch, Foster. Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee? Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1978
Hull, Elizabeth A. “A Popular Psychology Illuminates an ‘Elite’ Art Medium: A Look at Albee’s A Delicate Balance Through Transactional Analysis.” Pp. 1071-1086 in Michael T. Marsden, ed. Proceedings of the Sixth National Convention of the Popular Culture Association. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State Univ. Press, 1976
Jones, Edward T. “Revisiting and Re-visioning: A Delicate Balance (1973) and The Hotel New Hampshire (1984).” Pp. 237-249 in James M. Welsh and John C. Tibbetts, eds. The Cinema of Tony Richardson: Essays and Interviews. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999
Kane, Leslie. The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1984, 158-178 (169-177 on The Zoo Story)
Kerjan, Liliane. “Pure and Simple: The Recent Plays of Edward Albee.” Pp. 99-110 in June Schlueter, ed. Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989 (Listening, Counting the Ways, and The Lady from Dubuque)
Lahr, John. Up Against the Fourth Wall: Essays on Modern Theater. NY: Grove Press, 1970, 18-34: “The Adaptable Mr. Albee” (His three adaptations to date)
Leff, Leonard J. “A Test of American Film Censorship: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).” Pp. 211-229 in Peter C. Rollins, ed. Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Lexington: UP of Virginia, 1983
Leonard, Garry. “The Immaculate Deception: Adoption in Albee’s Plays.” Pp. 111-132 in Marianne Novy, ed. Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001
Lewis, Allan. American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre. Rev. ed. NY: Crown, 1970, 81-98: “Fun and Games with Edward Albee”
Liebler, Naomi C. “Magnified and Sanctified: Tiny Alice Reconsidered.” Pp. 192-210 in June Schlueter, ed. Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989
Little, Stuart W. Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater. NY: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972, 216-228 and see index
Loeffler, Donald L. An Analysis of the Treatment of the Homosexual Character in Dramas Produced in the New York Theatre from 1950 to 1968. NY: Arno Press, 1975, see index
Malkin, Jeannette R. Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992, 163-184: “Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Manocchio, Toney, and William Pettit. Families Under Stress: A Psychological Interpretation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1975, 169-203: “The Albee Family” (A Delicate Balance treated as a case study)
Manvell, Roger. Theater and Film: A Comparative Study of
the Two Forms of Dramatic Art, and of the Problems of Adaptation of Stage
Plays into Films. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1979, 228-237:
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Mayberry, Bob. Theatre of Discord: Dissonance in Beckett, Albee, and Pinter.
Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989, 34-51: “The Chinese
Box: Albee’s Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung”
McCarthy, Gerry. Edward Albee. London: Macmillan, 1987
Otten, Terry. After Innocence: Visions of the Fall in Modern Literature. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982, 174-91: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Paolucci, Anne. “Albee and the Restructuring of the Modern Stage” and “Albee on the Precipitous Heights (Two Arms Are Not Enough).” Pp. 293-313 and 314-335 in Anne and Henry Paolucci. Hegelian Literary Perspectives. Smyrna, DE: Griffon House for the Bagehot Council, 2002
-----. From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1972
Parker, Dorothy, ed. Essays on Modern American Drama: Williams, Miller, Albee, and Shepard. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1987, 109-159 (Five essays on Albee reprinted from the journal Modern Drama)
Pearlman, Mickey. “What’s New at the Zoo? Rereading Edward Albee’s American Dream(s) and Nightmares.” Pp. 183-191 in June Schlueter, ed. Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989 (on Zoo Story and American Dream)
Porter, Thomas E. Myth and Modern American Drama. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1969, 225-247: “Fun and Games in Suburbia: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Price, Steven. “Fifteen-Love, Thirty-Love: Edward Albee.” Pp. 247-262 in David Krasner, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005
Richmond, Hugh M. Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy: A Mirror for Lovers. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971, 177-199: “Shakespeare and Modern Sexuality: Albee’s Virginia Woolf and Much Ado”
Roudané, Matthew C. Understanding Edward Albee. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1987
-----. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities. Boston: Twayne, 1990
Rutenberg, Michael E. Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest. NY: Drama Book Specialists, 1969
Samuels, Charles T. “The Theatre of Edward Albee.” Pp. 383-400 in Hans Itschert, ed. Das amerikanische Drama von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972
Saraswathi, R. “The Metaphysical Dimension in Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice: A Study.” Pp. 98-114 in T. S. Anand, ed. Indian Response to American Literature. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2003
Sarotte, Georges M. Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1978, 134-149: “Edward Albee: Homosexual Playwright in Spite of Himself”
Schlueter, June. Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama. NY: Columbia UP, 1979, 79-87: “Albee’s Martha and George”
Schnebly, Cynthia. “Repetition and Failed Conversation in the Theater of the Absurd.” Pp. 98-112 in Barbara Johnstone and Roy O. Freedle, eds. Repetition in Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, I. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1994 (Parts on Zoo Story and American Dream)
Simard, Rodney. Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1984, 25-47: “Harold Pinter and Edward Albee: The First Postmoderns”
Stenz, Anita M. Edward Albee: The Poet of Loss. The Hague: Mouton, 1978
Szilassy, Zoltán. American Theater of the 1960s. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986, 11-23: “Edward Albee: First Among Equals”
Trilling, Diana. Claremont Essays. NY: Harcourt, 1964, 203-227: “The Riddle of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Vorlicky, Robert. Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995, 118-131 (on The Zoo Story)
Vos, Nelvin. Eugène Ionesco and Edward Albee: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968 (48 pp.)
Watzlawick, Paul, et al. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. NY: Norton, 1967, 148-186: “A Communicational Approach to the Play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Way, Brian. “Albee and the Absurd: The American Dream and The Zoo Story.” Pp. 188-207 in John R. Brown and Bernard Harris, eds. American Theatre. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 10. London: Edward Arnold, 1967
Weales, Gerald. The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960’s. NY: Macmillan, 1969, 24-53: “Edward Albee: Don’t Make Waves”
Wellwarth, George. The Theater of Protest and Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama. Rev. ed. NY: NY UP, 1971, 321-336: “Edward Albee”
Worth, Katharine. “Edward Albee: Playwright of Evolution.” Pp. 33-53 in Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim, eds. Essays on Contemporary American Drama. Munich: Hueber, 1981