Who's Afraid Of Edward Albee?

I have never met him or slept with him, but I have performed in 2 Albee pieces, playing Tobias in A Delicate Balance & Leslie in Seascape (where I played a talking lizard... really!). I loved both of these roles & I especially appreciated Albee’s take on relationships & the interactions between members of a couple, his common theme. 3 Pulitzer Prizes, 3 Tony Awards, & numerous other honors are testimony to the importance & influence of playwright Edward Albee.

His 50+ year career took off quickly with The Zoo Story in 1959, & was cemented with the 1962 Broadway success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, & continued into the 21st century with the Broadway production of The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?. Albee has scored more great successes than most playwrights. Among his 30+ plays: A Delicate Balance, Seascape, Tiny Alice, Three Tall Women & The Play About the Baby. Openly gay Albee is a stalwart political liberal, longtime member of the Dramatists Guild, & has a 15-year+ affiliation with the University of Houston where he conducts a playwriting workshop each spring.

Albee has unsparingly taken up subjects outside the average theatergoer's comfort zone: the capacity for sadism & violence in American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction & the positive presence of death.

Albee was with his partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas for 35 years, until Thomas’ death in 2005, at 59. Albee:“I was expecting to die way before Jonathan did. He was 18 years younger than I was, & the whole idea was that when I got to be my age, he’d be taking care of me, you know? But life doesn’t always work out the way it’s supposed to. You know, we had such a good, long relationship: 35 years. That’s a long time, a life in itself. Of course that makes it worse, but at the same time you can’t just say, ‘How dare you go away from me?’ — which is an attitude that a lot of people get. ‘How dare you die!’ There’s got to be a lot of ‘Thank you’ too. ‘Thank you for being alive & being with me for so long."  Check out the very readable & fascinating  Edward Albee- A Singular Journey by Mel Gussow.  Albee turns 83 today. He continues to write plays & teach.