Edward Albee, in full Edward Franklin Albee, (born March 12, 1928, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died September 16, 2016, Montauk, New York), American dramatist and theatrical producer best known for his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jul 18, 2020 HOMELIFE EDWARD ALBEE PDF - Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Edward Albee, the American dramatist, was born in He has written and directed some of the best plays in. Edward Albee. THE SANDBOX Written in 1959. Edward Albee, abandoned by his natural parents, was adopted two weeks after birth in 1928 by a wealthy couple in Westchester County, New York, and named after his adoptive grandfather, part owner of the Keith-Albee string of movie-and-vaudeville theaters. His early schooling frequently interrupted by family vaca. Edward Albee has defined modern American theater with four decades of provocative, controversial and brilliant plays. Lauded as “one of the eter-nal innovators” in American drama, he challenges audiences with stories that express the bone-simple, shattering truth of the human experience.

Edward Albee is often considered one of America's greatest modern playwrights, known for his biting wit, his mastery of dramatic tension, and his grasp of the 'Theatre of the Absurd,' a movement first established in the work of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Albee was born in Washington, DC on March 12, 1928. When he was two weeks old, baby Edward was adopted by millionaire couple Reed and Frances Albee. The Albees named their son after Reed's father, Edward Franklin Albee, a powerful vaudeville producer who had made the family fortune as a partner in the Keith-Albee Theater Circuit.

Edward Albee has defined modern American theater with four decades of provocative, controversial and brilliant plays. Lauded as “one of the eter-nal innovators” in American drama, he challenges audiences with stories that express the bone-simple, shattering truth of the human experience.

Young Edward was raised by his adoptive parents in Westchester, New York. Because of his father's and grandfather's involvement in the theatre business, Albee was exposed to theatre throughout his childhood. From early on, Edward's mother, Frances, worked to groom her son into a respectable member of New York society. The Albees' affluence meant that Edward's childhood was filled with servants and tutors. He went to afternoon meetings in the family Rolls Royce, he took riding lessons, vacationed in Miami in the winter, and learned to sail on Long Island Sound in the summer. In 1940, twelve-year-old Edward entered the Lawrenceville School, a prestigious boys' preparatory school. During his high school days, he shocked school officials by writing a three-act sex farce entitled Aliqueen. At the age of fifteen, the Lawrenceville School dismissed Albee for cutting classes. Hoping to inspire some discipline in his wayward son, Reed Albee enrolled his son at the Valley Forge Military Academy. Within a year, Valley Forge dismissed Albee.

Even as a teenager, Edward was a prolific writer. In 1945, his poem 'Eighteen' was published in the Texas literary magazine Kaleidoscope. In his senior year at Choate, Edward's first published play Schism appeared in the school literary magazine. After graduating from Choate, Edward enrolled at Trinity College, a small liberal arts school in Hartford, Connecticut. While there, Edward irked his mother by associating with artists and intellectuals whom she found objectionable. During his days at Trinity College, Edward gained a modicum of theatre experience as an actor, rather than as a writer. During his sophomore year, in 1947, nineteen-year-old Edward was dismissed from yet another school; Trinity College claimed that he had failed to attend chapel and certain classes. Despite his mother's objections, Edward moved to New York City's artsy Greenwich Village at the age of twenty. He supported himself by writing music programming for WNYC radio. In 1953, young Albee met playwright Thornton Wilder. Later, he credited Wilder with inspiring him to become a playwright, advice he did not follow for a few more years. Over the next decade, Albee lived on the proceeds of his grandmother's trust fund and held jobs as an office boy, record salesman, and Western Union messenger.

In 1958, Albee wrote his first major play, a one-act entitled The Zoo Story. When no New York producer would agree to stage it, Albee sent the play to an old friend, who secured its first production in Berlin. After its success abroad, American theatre producer Alan Schneider agreed to produce The Zoo Story Off Broadway in a double bill with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. This early association with Beckett served to cement Albee's connection to the Theatre of the Absurd. In fact, The Zoo Story was at the time of its production hailed as the birth of American absurdist drama.

Immediately, Albee became perceived as a leader of a new theatrical movement in America. His success was in part predicated on his ability to straddle the traditional and the avant-garde, combining the realistic with the surreal. Critics of Albee can rightfully see him as a successor to American playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill, while at the same time unmistakably influenced by European playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco.

Over the following years, Albee strengthened his reputation with a series of one-act plays, including The Death of Bessie Smith and The Sandbox, the latter of which he dedicated to his beloved grandmother. In 1961, The American Dream addressed themes that he would continue to explore throughout his long career. That same year, Albee adapted an unsuccessful production of Melville's short story Bartleby with his friend William Flanagan. Despite the success of his original work, Albee's adaptations—of Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe in 1963 and of James Purdy's Malcolm in 1965—have not been critically or popularly successful. Critics described them as static representations of literary works, simply transplanting existing scenes from the books to the stage.

Albee's real successes have always come from his original and absurdist dramas. His first three-act drama, and the play for which he is still best known, is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? produced in New York in 1962. It became immediately popular and controversial. While it was initially set to win the Pulitzer for Drama, when it came time to award the play, the committer reversed its decision. Nonetheless, the play received the Tony Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Create organized chaos with the FCPX: Audio Effector from Pixel Film Studios. Scale, bump, colorize, spin, and flash your media to the beat of music without ever having to set a keyframe in FCPX. Users simply have to import their media, choose a song file, and customize the look. Audio visualizer premiere pro.

In 1963, Albee joined with two friends in creating an absurdist group called 'Theater 1964,' which produced, among other things, Beckett's Play and Pinter's The Lover at Cherry Lane Theatre. After Malcolm closed after only five days, Albee rebounded with the success of A Delicate Balance in 1966. For this play, he received the Pulitzer Prize. Albee continued to write plays throughout the 1960's and 1970's. Everything in the Garden, adapted from a play by Giles Cooper, was produced in 1967, followed by: the original plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung in 1968; All Over in 1971; and Seascape in 1975. For Seascape, Albee was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize. Counting the Ways and Listening, which initially debuted as a radio play in England, was staged in New York in 1977. Throughout the 1980's, Albee's playwriting career failed to produce a substantial commercial hit. Plays from this period include: The Lady from Dubuque (1980), an adaptation of Lolita (1981), The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983), Finding the Sun (1985), and Marriage Play (1987). During this time, Albee also taught courses at various universities, especially in Houston, TX, and maintained his residence in New York.

In 1994, Albee experienced a much-awaited New York success with the play Three Tall Women. That play earned Albee his third Pulitzer Prize and his first commercial hit in over a decade. Three Tall Women also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Since that time, Albee's productions include: Lorca Play (1993); Fragments: A Concerto Grosso (1995); The Play about the Baby (1996); Occupant (2001); The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002); Knock! Knock! Who's There!? (2003); a one-act prequel to The Zoo Story entitled Peter and Jerry (2004); and Me, Myself and I (2007).

Edward Albee was a member of both the Dramatists Guild Council and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and taught courses in playwriting every spring at the University of Houston, the venue where Lorca Play was initially staged. Albee summed up his career thus: 'I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing—and I plan to go on writing until I'm ninety or gaga—it will all equal itself out. You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response.' Albee died of natural causes in Montauk in 2016.

Peter, a publishing executive, is reading on his favorite bench in New York City’s Central Park. Suddenly he is approached by a stranger named Jerry, who makes his entrance with the announcement “I’ve been to the zoo!” Jerry is intent on claiming the bench for himself, and proceeds to probe deep into Peter’s life.

In the preface to one publication of The Zoo Story, Albee recounts the origins of the play, including his work before The Zoo Story and why the play premiered in Berlin:

With the exception of a three-act sex farce I completed when I was twelve – the action of which occurred aboard an ocean liner, the characters of which were, for the most part, English gentry, and the title of which was, for some reason that escapes me now, Aliqueen – with the exception of that, The Zoo Story (1958), The Death of Bessie Smith and The Sandbox (both 1959), are my first three plays.

You need to scan the QR code shown on the site using your mobile phone (or tablet) and perform the required actions on your device.In order to be able to scan the code, use the camera of your phone. For Apple phones, no additional software is required (just point the camera at the QR code and follow the instructions). Most Android-based phones also do not require third-party programs.For those who have problems, we recommend a program for reading QR codes Privacy Friendly QR Scanner (we are not affiliated with this software, but tested this application and it performs the necessary functions).You can download it from google play.

Edward Albee Plays Pdf Online

The Zoo Story, written first, received production first – but not in the United States, where one might reasonably expect an American writer to get his first attention. The Zoo Story had its premiere in Berlin, Germany, on September 28, 1959. […]

Shortly after The Zoo Story was completed, while it was being read and politely refused by a number of New York producers […], a young composer friend of mine, William Flanagan by name, looked at the play, liked it, and sent it to several friends of his, among them David Diamond, another American composer, resident of Italy; Diamond liked the play and sent it on to a friend of his a Swiss actor, Pinkas Braun; Braun liked the play, made a tape recording of it, playing both its roles, which he sent on to Mrs. Stefani Hunzinger, who heads the drama department of the S. Fischer Verlag, a large publishing house in Frankfurt; she, in turn . . . well, through her it got to Berlin, and to production. From New York to Florence to Zurich to Frankfurt to Berlin. And finally back to New York where, on January 14, 1960, it received American production, off Broadway, at the Provincetown Playhouse, on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

Albee, Edward. Preface. The American Dream and The Zoo Story. New York: Penguin, 1997. 7-8.

Type: Short Play

Acts: One

First Performance: 28 September 1959, Schiller Theater, Berlin; 14 January 1960, Provincetown Playhouse, New York

Awards: Berlin Festival Award, 1960. Obie Award, 1960. Vernon Rice Memorial Award, 1960. Drama Desk Award, 1960. Argentine Critics Circle Award, 1961.

In 2004 Edward Albee delved deeper into The Zoo Story by adding a first act, Homelife, which precedes Peter’s fateful meeting with Jerry on the Central Park bench. The double bill was collectively titled Peter & Jerry, until 2009 when it was renamed At Home at the Zoo.

According to the publishing firm Samuel French, “The Zoo Story may be performed independently. However, Homelife may only be performed as part of the full length play At Home at the Zoo.”

“At Home at the Zoo (Zoo Story).” Samuel French. 2012. 1 May 2014 <http://www.samuelfrench.com/p/7482/at-home-at-the-zoo-zoo-story/>.

For more information on Homelife and the double bill, view our entry on At Home at the Zoo.

Plot Summary and Critical Analysis by Michelle Dodson

“I’ve been to the zoo. I said, I’ve been to the zoo. MISTER, I’VE BEEN TO THE ZOO!” exclaims Jerry, a man in his late thirties who is “carelessly dressed but not poorly,” to Peter, who is at this particular moment sitting alone on a bench in Central Park in New York City, reading a book. Peter is slightly older than Jerry and is described as wearing “tweeds” and “carries horn-rimmed glasses” along with a pipe.[1] In this opening scene of Albee’s first produced play, Jerry begins what turns out to be a long exchange with Peter, who politely acknowledges this total stranger but hopes soon to return to his book.

Jerry asks Peter personal questions about his home life, learning that along with his wife and two daughters, Peter’s household contains “two cats” and “two parakeets.”[2] Jerry questions Peter about where he lives before beginning his own lengthy description of the condition and the surrounding neighbors of his “four-story brownstone rooming house on the Upper West Side.”[3] From Jerry’s description, Peter concludes that “It doesn’t sound like a very nice place to live.”[4] Peter learns that Jerry has no family and his relationships do not last or mean anything, other than a fling he had at fifteen about which he describes himself as having been a “h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l” for a week and a half.[5] Instead of explaining the “zoo story,” Jerry begins to talk about his rooming house again, specifically about his landlady and her dog. He states that his landlady, whom he describes as “a bag of garbage,” is constantly trying to sleep with him while the dog, a “black monster of a beast,” never lets Jerry past without attempting to attack him.[6]

This begins Jerry’s monologue, which he titles “THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG.”[7] Jerry explains his plan to Peter: “First…kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work… just kill him.”[8] After a few weeks of buying hamburgers for the dog with no progress, he feeds it poisoned hamburgers. “I’m afraid I must tell you,” Jerry states, “I wanted the dog to live so that I could see what our new relationship might come to.”[9] Jerry interrupts his story to talk about his problem with connecting with people, ultimately stating that “if not [with] people…SOMETHING. Where better to make a beginning…to understand and just possibly be understood…a beginning of an understanding, than with… than with A DOG. Just that; a dog.”[10] The dog does survive the attempted poisoning and Jerry describes their first reencounter as the first moment that he was able to “make contact.” After a moment of silence, Jerry finishes his story, explaining to Peter that now he and the dog “have an understanding” and that he has “learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves”; rather, the “two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion.”[11]

Peter does not understand why Jerry has told him all of this and tries to leave. Jerry responds by tickling Peter’s ribs, causing him to laugh uncontrollably. Jerry explains he went to the zoo to “find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other….”[12] Jerry then suddenly pokes Peter in the arm and tells him to move over on the bench. Jerry continues to poke Peter again and again, harder each time, demanding that he move over. Finally, Peter exclaims that there is nowhere else to move to, so Jerry starts punching Peter in the arm. Jerry tells Peter that he wants the bench to himself and that he will only tell him “what happened at the zoo” if Peter gives up the bench or fights for it. After Peter agrees to fight Jerry for the bench, Jerry pulls out a knife and throws it at Peter’s feet, to make it a more even fight. Peter picks up the knife in a defensive position and Jerry runs towards him, impaling himself on the knife. Jerry staggers backward, the knife still embedded in him, and falls on the bench which the two men had just been fighting over. Realizing that he is dying, Jerry thanks Peter: “I came unto you and you have comforted me. Dear Peter.”[13] Jerry wipes the knife clean of Peter’s fingerprints and tells him to leave, concluding that Peter is “no longer a vegetable,” rather he is now “an animal, too.”[14] The play ends with Peter grabbing his book and rushing offstage screaming, “Oh my god!” while Jerry dies alone on the bench.

Edward Albee wrote The Zoo Story in 1958 and it was first performed in Germany the following year during the Berlin Festival. The Zoo Story then appeared Off-Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse during the winter of 1960.[15] In The New York Times review, The Zoo Story was said to be “on par” with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which was playing together with The Zoo Story in a double-bill.[16]

The play’s themes of “fragmentation, alienation, and isolation” have led many critics to classify The Zoo Story as an absurdist drama. However, even in The Theatre of the Absurd, the book which first attached the absurd label to Albee, Martin Esslin concludes that Albee’s play does not fall into this category and “ultimately fails as an absurdist drama.”[17] Siefker Bailey agrees with Esslin, saying that the “play does not end on an absurdist note” and that “the characters and the audience are left with a story full of purpose and meaning.”[18] Albee uses his spokesman character to relay the importance of communication since throughout the play Jerry tries to establish contact with Peter by telling him stories. If Jerry can make his stories “real” to Peter or members of the audience then Jerry can escape his feelings of loneliness and isolation. Albee ultimately uses the shock of the violence at the play’s conclusion in order to “instill in his audience the idealistically American call to action to change the world for the better.”[19]

However, many critics still argue that The Zoo Story does in fact fall into the classification of the Theatre of the Absurd. Philip C. Kolin states that Albee uses “techniques and ideas from the ‘absurdist’ plays of European playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco.” Kolin further states that Albee’s ideas are “distinctively American, pressing for American change and reform.”[20] Brian Way expands on this idea of absurdism by referring to The Zoo Story as “belonging to the second level of the Theatre of the Absurd,” which he then goes on to explain as showing “a brilliantly inventive sense of what can be done with the techniques, but stops short of the metaphysic which makes the techniques completely meaningful.”[21] In other words, The Zoo Story tries to somewhat explain the way the world works. However, it never directly provides us with a concrete solution, which helps to define it as an absurdist play. Way then describes the “pseudo- crisis” of an absurd play as occurring when “a similar complex of tensions is brought to a head without resolving anything…emphasizing that complexity and tension are permanent and unresolvable elements of a world of confusion,” while in a dramatic play the crisis serves as a way to advance the story’s action.[22] In this view, by the end of The Zoo Story nothing has truly been resolved between Jerry and Peter; their inability to establish a human connection is insurmountable. The play ends simply because Jerry dies.

The dynamic between Jerry and Peter is another important factor in critics’ discussion of The Zoo Story, as Gilbert Debusscher defines one of the primary themes to be “the virulent criticism of bourgeois complacency, of the hypocrisy of a good conscience, the emptiness of the false values of American life supported by advertising and pseudo-intellectual magazines.”[23] In this regard, Peter is the representative of the bourgeois class and Jerry can be seen as an outsider who ultimately observes and criticizes the norm. As Debusscher states, the “complacency” that accompanies Peter in the beginning of the play, even through his continued discussion with Jerry, remains at the end. Since Jerry does not share this complacency he is instead given a strong sense of “individualism” that is also “voiced in rebellion.”[24] As Jerry dies at the end of the play, Debusscher believes his death to be an act of “escape from an unbearable world.”[25] Jerry has extreme difficulties when it comes to making connections and is ultimately used by Albee to reveal the “social inadequacies” of Jerry as a character.[26]

Jerry’s personality is further examined by Lucina Gabbard; she uses Dr. Kernberg’s evaluation of Jerry having a “borderline personality” that lies somewhere between neurosis and psychosis.[27] The cause of this particular type of personality is the result of Jerry losing his parents and ultimately himself. This in turn leads Jerry to experience a type of “abandonment depression,” in which he cannot escape and ultimately loses his ability to make connections.[28] However, a less tragic interpretation of the action is that Jerry is seen to represent the “Existential hero” because he makes his own decisions and ultimately choses when and where he is going to die.[29]

When specifically examining the final scene of The Zoo Story, some critics note many similarities to the biblical Peter and the relation between Jerry and Jesus. Jerry, like Jesus, embodies an outcast whose sole purpose is to “establish contact.”[30] When Jerry begins to tell the story about the dog, the dog becomes a representation of “Cerberus,” the guardian of the entrance to hell, through Jerry’s description: “all black with flaming eyes.”[31] Jerry’s journey from the zoo to Central Park can also be an allegory for “Christ’s decent into Hell and Resurrection,” both of which must happen before “Redemption” can occur.[32] The simple way in which Jerry talks to Peter is reminiscent of the Gospels, which are also written in colloquial diction. Jerry’s death resembles the death of Jesus, as he seems to be crucified in order to save Peter from a life of complacency. In other words, Jerry dies “to save Peter’s soul from death by spiritual starvation.”[33] However, this idea is not supported by every critic, as Mary Castiglie Anderson states that there is no biblical allusion; rather, the ending of the play signifies Jerry as the guide or “teacher” to Peter’s maturity and autonomy.”[34] Overall, The Zoo Story operates as a vehicle for various levels of human interaction and communication, ultimately showing humanity’s need for contact, as well as the broader sense of the differences between economic classes and the idea of complacency during this period of American history.

[1] Albee 14.
[2] Albee 19.
[3] Albee 21.
[4] Albee 22.
[5] Albee 24.
[6] Albee 25.
[7] Albee 27.
[8] Albee 27.
[9] Albee 29.
[10] Albee 30.
[11] Albee 31.
[12] Albee 34.
[13] Albee 39.
[14] Albee 40.
[15] Tallmer 1.
[16] Tallmer 1.
[17] Quoted in Lisa Siefker Bailey 31.
[18] Siefker Bailey 32.
[19] Siefker Bailey 34.
[20] Kolin 17.
[21] Way 66.
[22] Way 70.
[23] Debusscher 75.
[24] Amacher 38.
[25] Debusscher 75.
[26] Debusscher 75.
[27] Gabbard 19.
[28] Gabbard 20.
[29] Amacher 39.
[30] Zimbardo 30.
[31] Zimbardo 30.
[32] Zimbardo 31.
[33] Zimbardo 52.
[34] Castiglie 93.

Albee, Edward. The Zoo Story, in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee 1958-1965. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007, 11-40. Print.

Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Print.

List Of Edward Albee Plays

Bigsby, C.W.E. Albee. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969. Print.

Debusscher, Gilbert. “The Playwright in the Making.” Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Ed. Philip C. Kolin and J. Madison Davis. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986. 74-80. Print.

Gabbard, Lucina P. “Unity in the Albee Vision.” Edward Albee, Planned Wilderness: Interview, Essays, and Bibliography. Ed. Patricia De La Fuente, Donald E. Fritz, Jan Seale, and Dorey Schmidt. Edinburg, TX: School of Humanities, Pan American U, 1980. 18-31. Print.

Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Print.

Kolin, Philip C. “Albee’s Early One Act Plays: A New American Playwright from Whom Much Is to Be Expected.” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. Ed. Stephen J. Bottoms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005. 16-37. Print.

Kolin, Philip C., and J. Madison Davis. “Introduction.” Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986. 8-11. Print.

Siefker Bailey, Lisa M. “Absurdly American: Rediscovering the Representation of Violence in The Zoo Story.” Edward Albee: A Casebook. Ed. Bruce J. Mann. New York: Routledge, 2003. 31-43. Print.

Tallmer, Jerry. “The Voice Reviews Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.” Village Voice The Archives. 8 July 2009. Web. 6 May 2016.

Way, Brian. “Albee and the Absurd: The American Dream and The Zoo Story.” Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Ed. Philip C. Kolin. and J. Madison Davis. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986. 65-73. Print.