Term Papers on EDWARD ALBEE

Term Paper Title	EDWARD ALBEE
# of Words	1016
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.06

EDWARD ALBEE

     “The best American playwright since Arthur Miller." A master of ‘depraved obscenity.’  An unflinching dissector of dysfunction. A willfully abstract audience-basher.”
              For about four decades, critics and theater-watchers have been calling Edward Albee names.  His harsh wit and language and amazing endings have won him three Pulitzer Prizes and cost him a fourth. Once off-Broadway’s leading light, Albee lasted for a close to 20-year drought before capturing his most recent Pulitzer, in 1994.
      Albee can handle it. He thinks that the acclaim and neglect, the overpraise and underpraise, his  27 plays have earned will even out in the end — as long as he doesn’t screw-up his thoughts with other peoples.
     "I enjoy being a playwright," he said during a recent Northeastern University visit.  "Playwriting at its very best is an act of aggression against the status quo.  It says, ‘This is who you are and how you behave. If you don’t like it, why don’t you change?’"
     Tall, slim, tweedy, with a patrician accent and looking a bit younger than 70, Albee would have changed his own sad past if he could.  An orphan raised in chauffeured luxury, Edward was packed off to the first of three boarding schools at age 11.
     At Trinity, "I discovered that the required courses were not the ones I required." So he cut the classes that bored him and audited the ones that didn’t.
     "It tells you something about the management of Trinity at the time that they didn’t catch up with me until the middle of the sophomore year," he recalls. "That ended my formal education, and I suppose it didn’t matter much. I’d figured out how to educate myself, and  keep on doing it. To be fair to Trinity, I would have been unhappy at any college or university."
     Albee was even more unhappy when his adoptive mother ejected him from the family mansion for homosexuality. He moved to Greenwich Village, surviving as a luncheonette counterman, office boy and telegraph messenger, and devouring the Absurdist plays of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. His favorite gig was at Western Union. "I didn’t use  my mind at all, and walking around the Upper West Side was good exercise."
     As a 30th birthday present to himself, he quit the $38-a-week job — but not before "liberating" a beat-up typewriter and curling yellow copy paper from his employer. After two and one-half weeks at his kitchen table, he’d finished The Zoo Story — a play about a middle-class man in the publishing business hounded into killing an alienated man who happened to confront him in Central Park. Foreshadowing the future, New York producers rejected the mordant one-acter.
     But after its success in West Germany, Albee recalls, "my life changed." The play ran three and one-half years off-Broadway, while his next works, The Sandbox, The American Dream, and The Death of Bessie Smith, entranced theatergoers with their attack on a complacent society.
      And then came Who’s Afraid o...

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