From The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Volume IV, No. 1, Winter, 1997.

AGGRESSING AGAINST THE STATUS QUO

AN INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD ALBEE by LESTER STRONG

Ever since his theatrical debut in the late 1950's, Edward Albee has been recognized as one of the foremost American dramatists of the 20th century. He and his works have also been controversial, not the least because he is a playwright who happens to be gay.

The questions about his work have come from all sides. Some critics have discerned hidden homosexual "implications" in many of his plays -- in The Zoo Story, in Tiny Alice, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- and in a less than friendly manner have accused him of everything from misogyny and "sexual fear of powerful women" to "evasions of sex" and writing full-blown "gay masquerades" intended to deceive his "unsuspecting bourgeois" audiences. But he has also managed to offend some in the gay community by his refusal to focus his work primarily on gay issues. In his own words, he considers himself "a playwright who's gay" and not a "professionally gay playwright."

When I interviewed Albee last winter, his 1994 Pulitzer-Prize-winning play Three Tall Women was just embarking on its National Tour. Three Tall Women takes place in two acts. In Act I, a 26-year-old woman and a 52-year-old women visit the sick room of a dying 91-year-old woman. In Act II, all three become different ages of the same dying woman as they debate the shape they have given to their collective life. The play, to my knowledge, is the only one in which Albee acknowledges any autobiographical elements: The dying old lady was based on his adoptive mother Frances Albee.

A revival of Albee's A Delicate Balance, starring Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard, and Elaine Stritch, opened at the Plymouth Theater in New York last April for a five-month run. The play's original production won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. -- LESTER STRONG

Lester Strong: Critics and commentators have used the following terms to describe your plays: avant-garde, nihilistic, experimentalist, absurdist, existentialist, postmodern, surrealist, and realistic. Where do you yourself place your work among all those labels?

Edward Albee: I don't categorize myself. They are talking about one play after another, because I work in very different styles depending upon the reality demands of the play. If the play wants to be naturalistic, it'll be naturalistic. If it needs to be highly symbolic, it'll be that. If it needs to be avant-garde and fairly obscure, it'll be that. Form and content codetermine each other.

LS: Where would you place Three Tall Women among these different styles?

EA: Well, you see, I think all of my plays are absolutely realistic -- every single one of them, no matter what degree of stylization they have. Three Tall Women is an absolutely naturalistic play about three ages, three women who happen to be three ages of the same woman in an impossible but realistic conversation with each other.

LS: Why does the theater appeal to you as a writer? Why not write fiction, for example?

EA: I started writing poetry when I was a kid, and it wasn't very good. I wrote two novels, and they weren't very good either. And I didn't do very well with the short story or the essay, so there wasn't very much left. But to give you the simple answer, I write plays because I'm a playwright. I think like a playwright, I walk like a playwright, I smell like a playwright, and I write like a playwright. You know, playwrights have slightly different minds than novelists and poets do. That's why most novelists and poets don't write very good plays, most playwrights don't write very good novels, and so on. There are a few exceptions -- Chekhov, Beckett. But not too many.

LS: It has occurred to me that your plays have received such different receptions from different people because of certain ambiguities they can present when performed.

EA: Well, mind you, the plays get such different responses because they're being reviewed by different people. And no two people see the same play, whether they're critics or not. No two people bring the same intelligence, the same sophistication, the same perception, the same willingness to participate. No two people bring those same things to the viewing of a play. So you'd expect different reactions from different people.

LS: You've been writing what I would call confrontational dramas and even comedies about powerful, in-your-face characters for a long time now. Have your theatrical themes and interests changed over time?

EA: I think some of my concerns have remained fairly constant -- people not communicating with each other, preferring to skid through life rather than participate in it; some intentional cruelties, some avoidances. All that stuff, yes. That's a pretty large field to concern yourself with.

LS: You say in the Plume edition of Three Tall Women that you can pinpoint the genesis of the play in terms of your personal history --

EA: Well, this particular play, sure, since it was a takeoff or theme-and-variations on a real character.

LS: Can you pinpoint its theme?

EA: That's difficult to do. I hate doing that with any play because if you can describe in a couple of sentences what a play should be, that's probably as long as it should be. But -- what is the theme of Three Tall Women? I think we have to be terribly careful as we go through our lives to stay right on top of ourselves so that we don't end up as the lady does in Three Tall Women, filled with anger and rage and regret. She gets trapped into getting by, making do. Everybody has to make choices. Some of them turn out to be terrible compromises, of course.

LS: Turning to another subject: You've been accused of being a "closet gay" who surreptitiously imports gay themes into your works, into heterosexual situations --

EA: That's bullshit, of course. There's a distinction to be made between a playwright who's gay and a professionally gay playwright. There are some playwrights who concentrate on writing gay themes in their plays. I know the difference between men and women. Back in the old days, there was a suggestion that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was written about two gay couples. Nonsense! A hysterical pregnancy in a gay relationship?

LS: I also want to ask how your homosexuality does relate to your writing. It doesn't seem to be quite at the center of your writing self in the same way it is, say, for Tony Kushner or Harvey Fierstein.

EA: Well, I made a statement at a gay OutWrite conference in San Francisco about four or five years ago. My speech was about anti-ghettoization in gay literature -- that I think gay writing by itself has no virtue, and that there are a lot of publishers out there who are taking advantage of gays because gay people will read anything with a gay theme. I started off by saying I belong to a great number of minorities. I'm male, to begin with, which is a minority; I'm white, which is a minority; I live in the United States, which is a minority; I'm educated, which is a minority; I'm a writer and creative person, which is certainly a minority; I'm agnostic, which is probably a minority; and I also happen to be gay. These are all minorities, and I don't know why I'm supposed to be responsible to just one of them. That I should limit myself to writing about only one of the minorities, to begin with, is absolutely ridiculous. I don't think being gay is itself a theme. Nobody thinks of being straight as a theme for a play; no one has ever written a play about being straight. It's so weird. Some of the characters in my plays are gay. But in terms of being gay, it's not my overriding preoccupation.

LS: Getting back to your plays in general, you're usually considered part of the avant-garde, and many critics have stated that at least in your younger years you were very much influenced by Beckett, among others.

EA: Well, you know, there are four or five playwrights in the 20th century that anyone's a damn fool not to be influenced by. They include Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, and Brecht. I think they're the four giants of 20th-century drama. Among American playwrights, I've been influenced by both Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. You're supposed to be influenced by people who come before you who have done interesting work. You're meant to be influenced. The only thing with influence is that you turn it as much as you possibly can into yourself so that the influence becomes integrated into your work and nobody is aware of it. You don't want to go around copying people. You know, early on in his career people used to say that Harold Pinter was influenced too much by Beckett, that Harold's rhythms were very similar to Beckett's rhythms, which is interesting and curious because Sam's ear came from Ireland and Harold's from the East End of London, which are slightly different things. But I guess the trick is to be influenced by the right people and not the wrong people.

LS: How do you distinguish your own writing from these influences?

EA: I hope I have a voice that is individually me.

LS: And what do you think that voice is?

EA: Damned if I know. People keep telling me, "Oh, go see this new young playwright. He's very influenced by you." I'll go, and I can't see it for the most part. I don't know what it is. But people do tell me that the way I write is very specific and clear. I try not to think about that, you see, because then if I started to write a play I would start thinking, "Is this sounding like me?" What a dumb question to ask yourself! No, I wouldn't do that, because you're thinking about yourself in the third person that way. I don't like to do that.

LS: You've talked about the audience as an active participant in the dramatic experience. Could you comment on that?

EA: To a certain extent a good play is an act of aggression against the status quo -- the psychological, philosophical, moral, or political status quo. A play is there to shake us up a little bit, to make us consider the possibility of thinking differently about things. Now this involves the audience. Another way of involving the audience, of course, is to write the type of play in which the actors -- or the characters, rather -- talk directly to the audience, engaging the audience in conversation. This involves the audience in a different way because the audience can't be a passive spectator. It can't be sitting at the keyhole.

LS: I remember one time in the late 60's or early 70's walking into a theater where the performers came out and started bringing people right onto the stage. It was a scary experience.

EA: Of course. Because audiences, you know, want to be invisible.

LS: Is there anything you're working on currently that you'd care to comment about?

EA: I'm working on a play called The Play About the Baby, so that when anybody asks someone, "Have you seen The Play About the Baby?" they'll reply, "No. What's it about?" or "What's it called?" And the person can answer, "the play about the baby"!

LS: In preparing for this interview I put on the tape of the movie version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and found it's still as powerful as I remembered it. I know the movie was changed around from the play in terms of the setting and maybe some of the dialogue --

EA: And the ages of the characters. You know they promised me Bette Davis -- James Mason and Bette Davis, who were both the right age for it. It would have been a different experience.

LS: Well, I have to say that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton will always be Martha and George for me, and I expect they will be for anybody who saw that movie.

EA: I imagine so. Sure.

LS: That covers all the questions I have. Is there anything else we've talked about that's brought anything to mind you feel is unanswered?

EA: The unanswered question. The unanswerable question is really what you're talking about.


From The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Volume IV, No. 1, Winter, 1997.