Biography of Edward Albee
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Edward Albee, one of America’s most revolutionary and celebrated playwrights, was born on March 12, 1928 in Washington, DC. Albee was adopted two weeks later by Reed and Francis Albee of Larchmont, NY. His adoptive grandfather and namesake, Edward Franklin Albee II, was a founder of the Keith-Albee organization, which dominated theater ownership in the US from vaudeville through the early days of moving pictures. While Albee’s childhood included wealth and privilege, his relationship with his parents was never warm. As a teenager, he was expelled from Lawrenceville Academy and Valley Forge Military Academy, but finally graduated from Choate. After three semesters at Trinity College, he left for New York City at the age of twenty, where he joined the Greenwich Village set of bohemian writers and artists, and cut off his communication with his parents.
Albee’s recognition by the international theater world began in 1959 with the Berlin premiere of The Zoo Story. It opened off-Broadway in 1960, on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The string of plays that followed in the early 1960’s, including such works as The Sandbox, Fam and Yam, American Dream, and The Death of Bessie Smith, proved that Albee was a literary force to be reckoned with and earned him the title of “The King of Off-Broadway.” Any remaining doubts regarding Albee's reputation within the New York theater establishment were definitively dispelled by the great Broadway success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, this play secured Albee's standing as one of the great dramatists of his time. He received a Tony Award, a Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? startled mainstream audiences out of their comfortable notions of the American Dream and brought challenging theater back to Broadway.
In the years following the success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee continued to pursue an ever deeper understanding of the individual's relationship to the modern world. In 1966's A Delicate Balance he explored the nature of man's increasing detachment, and received his first Pulitzer Prize. Throughout the 1960s and 70s Albee continued to produce plays of note including All Over in 1971 and Seascape in 1975, which were originally written as a pair of one act plays entitled Life and Death, and later expanded. With Seascape, a play about a retired vacationing couple who meet a pair of sea lizards at the beach, he earned his second Pulitzer Prize. His work during this time extended to helping other artists as well: in 1967, with the proceeds from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he established the Edward Albee foundation, which provides space and time for writers and visual artists to pursue their work without distractions.
By the 1980s Albee regularly taught at various universities, maintaining his residence in New York and continuing to write. In 1994 Albee’s third Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Three Tall Women, was produced. This delicate and moving play, which depicts one woman at three different stages of her life, won Albee several theater awards that season, including Best Play awards from both the New York Drama Critics Circle and the Outer Critics Circle. In 1996 Albee received both the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts.
Albee has had an active 21st century as well. The Play About the Baby premiered off-Broadway in 2001 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the Broadway production of The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? won the 2002 Tony Award for Best Play. In 2005 Edward Albee was presented with a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, recognizing him as America’s greatest living playwright. A number of productions in the current theatrical season attest to Albee’s continued prominence in American theater. Peter and Jerry, presented by the Second Stage Theatre, pairs his original success, Zoo Story, with a new first act, Homelife, exploring the life and marriage of one of Zoo Story’s characters in greater depth. Revivals of Albee’s plays are also being performed at the Cherry Lane Theatre (The Sandbox and The American Dream, directed by Albee) and the Signature Theatre Company (Occupant). McCarter’s production of Me, Myself & I is the latest premiere in the consistently noteworthy and influential collection of Edward Albee’s lifelong body of work.
