October 1 to 31, 2010

A Visit with Edward Albee
– Jeffrey Sweet

Edward Albee had long felt that, in his 1959 one-act, The Zoo Story, he had written “a 1 ½ character play.” Says Albee, “Peter was there so Jerry had someone to talk to.” There is mention in The Zoo Story of Peter’s wife, and Albee always knew who she was. “I also knew that what happened to Jerry in the park happened because of what had occurred earlier with his wife.” Almost fifty years after The Zoo Story premiered off-Broadway and established him as an important new voice, Albee decided to write what he knew about Peter and his wife and how what happened between them propelled Peter into that fateful encounter with Jerry. To his mind, the new first act completes the work, which now bears the title At Home at the Zoo.

The Zoo Story always struck me as capturing a moment when the complacency of the Fifties had to give way to the Sixties. As we sit in his TriBeCa loft (surrounded by a legendary collection of African art and abstract paintings), I ask if he had had any concerns that a work that was the product of a certain time would join well with a new, preceding act that was written so many years later. This doesn’t seem to concern him. “I think one can get too hung up on the circumstances of a play’s composition.” His observations about complacency may have been born in the Fifties, but Peter’s complacency is still with us.

Albee did update a few references in the second act. In the original, Peter, an editor of text books, said he made, “Eighteen thousand a year.” In 1959, that was enough to live a solid, middle-class life. (Not long before then, Albee says, “I lived in a sixth floor, walk-up, coldwater flat in the East Village for fourteen dollars month. Today you can’t afford to be poor.”) In the second act of At Home at the Zoo, Peter now allows he makes about two hundred thousand a year. “I sometimes wonder if that’s enough,” the writer muses.

I first met Albee thirty years ago. Broadway producer Richmond Crinkley was briefly in charge of the theatre at Lincoln Center, and his impulse was to pack an advisory board with celebrities including Woody Allen and Sarah Caldwell. “That turned out to be a mistake,” says Albee dryly. Crinkley recruited Albee to curate a series of bills of one-acts to run in the off-Broadway-sized Mitzi Newhouse Theatre. I was one of the God-knows-how-many who submitted work to him. One day I got a phone call from him. When I gathered my young wits, he told me he had decided one of my plays would run on the first bill with pieces by John Guare and the late Percy Granger. (As it turned out, that first bill ended up being the only bill produced.)

In the meantime, he and Crinkley had had a falling out. I remind Albee that Crinkley scheduled our rehearsals at the same time Albee had a commitment to be out of town, and that I thought it was the producer’s way of making certain Albee wouldn’t be there to protect the writers. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says. The experience ended up being a discouraging one for most concerned. Several years went by without my running into Albee. Then one day, we found ourselves on a panel together, and I reminded him of our encounter through Lincoln Center. In the meantime, Mr. Crinkley had passed away. This had not softened Albee’s feelings. “I know it’s not seemly to speak ill of the dead,” he said, “but shall we?”

Last year, when my play Flyovers ran in New York, he called to tell me he intended to attend. Mindful of the fact that he was 80 years old, I said he might want to consider that the theatre where it was playing was on the third floor, there was no elevator and the stairs were steep. “I think I can manage that,” he replied, a little miffed at the idea I thought such considerations might daunt him.

After the performance, he was generous with his comments. “It’s a beautiful play,” he said. “But don’t you think the ending could be a little more ... bleak?”

“Edward,” I said, and I referred to the central character, “at the end he’s weeping in despair.”

“Yes, Jeff, but he’s not alone.”

Albee has been on the receiving end of his share of eyebrow-raising responses to his work. He recalls that one came in the wake of the first production of The Zoo Story – a letter from a nun. “She insisted it was a Christian allegory.” He started to read her letter prepared to be amused, but as he read he became convinced that her comments were valid. “I didn’t intend for it to be a Christian allegory. I didn’t think of Jerry as a Christ figure. But clearly she was right. Some of what I had absorbed obviously informed the play on a subconscious level. Even to the point of Peter denying Jerry three times.” But then, as Albee observes, a play is an encounter between what the playwright intends and what the playgoer brings to it, and, being a nun, she was going to be sensitive to certain concerns.

I suggest that it might be hard for younger audiences to understand how the appearance of The Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? changed the American theatre. Just as contemporary moviegoers encountering Citizen Kane for the first time can’t appreciate its innovations because they have been so integrated into the grammar of film that they now seem familiar devices, it would be hard for those coming to Albee’s early works for the first time to appreciate what was new about them. After all, a lot of what I and other playwrights have written has been written in a post-Who’s Afraid world. His writing established precedents that are now in the DNA of a lot of our scripts.

“I’m sometimes aware of the influence of my writing in a passage of someone else’s work,” he acknowledges, but then he thinks that’s just the nature of the development of artists. He is quick to acknowledge influences on him, too. Beckett is an obvious example. “I met him. You know I ordinarily have no trouble talking, but with him I was tongue-tied. He was very kind and helped me through it.” A couple of other influences are more surprising. It turns out he is a big fan of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and was particularly moved by David Cromer’s production when it transferred to New York. He also has warm memories of seeing Fredric March, Florence Eldridge and Tallulah Bankhead in The Skin of Our Teeth, especially the moment a distraught Mrs. Antrobus speaks the name of her second son for the first time – Cain. “Devastating.”

Noel Coward is an even less likely forebear, though Private Lives trades in the kind of wit that is also identified with Albee. Albee nods. “It’s so much more interesting to write about intelligent people.” I mention having read an introduction he wrote to an anthology of Coward. “What I liked was his absolute control of structure. I thought that was marvelous. And his characters were both funny and real at the same time.” He was friendly with Coward. “I liked him a lot. He was a good guy. I made the mistake of taking him to the opening night of my play, The Ballad of the Sad Café [based on the novel by Carson McCullers]. He said, ‘Edward, my dear, this is not my kind of play. All these people – what do they want? And why are they outdoors all the time?’”

Albee has been teaching young playwrights for a number of years. In his experience, the first play usually isn’t that difficult to come up with. Most young writers can find the subject matter of their first in their own lives. It’s the second play that is the problem. Then they have to find new subject matter and their self-consciousness is liable to impede them. His solution? “I try to get them to skip right to their third play.”

He also encourages them to know something of arts outside their specific field. He remembers his young years in the late fifties and early sixties when he and fellow writers like Jack Gelber and Jack Richardson would meet for lengthy bull sessions in cafes. “We talked about African art and what did we think of Elliot Carter’s newest piece.”

Music is a major influence on him. “Bach, of course. His architecture.” he says. “People often ask me what music I listen to when I write. I don’t. I listen to the music of what’s happening in my play. Sometimes when I write a play, I think I’m writing a string quartet.”

Talk of music brings him to the subject of musical adaptations of his own work. Or, more specifically, the lack of them. “Everybody wants to make Virginia Woolf into an opera. I tell them something that makes them all back off – I don’t allow cuts or changes. So, if you want to write Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as an opera, it’s going to be longer than Parsifal.” If his work were going to be adapted by anybody, he thinks the ideal composer would have been the late Virgil Thomson. “He developed a theory of prosody – that each syllable has a different note value. He’s the only composer – in his songs and his operas – you can understand every single word being sung.”

I ask if he’s ever enjoyed a parody of his work. “Most of them are bad. Really good parody requires the writer have the same level of intelligence as the writer being parodied.” He mentions a parodist who passes muster. “Nobody reads James Thurber any more, but he once did a piece on one of those Southern writers. He wrote about seven pages of this really Southern gothic stuff, and then he stopped and added a last sentence, ‘You keep on long enough and it turns into a novel.’” Has he ever been tempted to write a parody? “Not intentionally.”

We talk about parody sometimes being based on talents undertaking subject matter that was inappropriate for them. I tell of him of a revue in which the writers hypothesized what would have happened if Coward had attempted to write “If I Were a Rich Man” for Fiddler on the Roof. It occurs to me that some might have felt it was as much of a mismatch for him to undertake revising the musical version of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s for producer David Merrick (in which Mary Tyler Moore played Holly Golightly). Albee was brought in to attempt rewrites of Abe Burrows’s script after a disastrous tryout in Boston.

“I liked Truman’s book, and I saw what Abe Burrows had done to it. He wrote Holly as a call girl who was a virgin. I thought it was my responsibility to try to bring it back to what Truman had intended. They didn’t give me enough time. We only went dark for a week. If I’d had another couple of weeks, I think I could have done it. Whether it would have been popular, I have no idea. But it would have resembled what Truman intended. Truman seemed to like what I wrote. He thought I was on the right track.”

Talk turns to guilty pleasures. Are there things he enjoys that would surprise his audience? “Probably. Some long-running TV shows that I think are so skillfully done. There’s an awful lot of very clever people working on television. Very smart at their craft. Seinfeld is an extraordinary example of a brilliantly put together show. You can’t believe a word of it, but I have fun watching the structure.”

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