Edward Albee

Edward Albee spoke at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. The evening featured him in conversation with Tony Taccone. Albee was a pretty lively speaker and a fast thinker and it took little prompting from Taccone to get him talking.

Albee spoke about how he came to be a playwright. About how he started as a poet and "not a very good one." "I basically tried everything else and playwrighting was the only thing I hadn't tried, so I did that." He then shared with us how he'd met Thorton Wilder. Albee had gone up to a writer's retreat and Wilder was there. Albee travelled with a trunk containing everything he'd written because "you never know..." When he met Wilder, he handed him all of his poems to read.

The next day Wilder came up to him and said: "Albee, I want to get drunk with you." So the two of them went down to the lake and drank bourbon while Wilder critiqued every one of Albee's poems. After Wilder finished discussing each poem, he set it afloat on the lake. By the time he finished, Albee said, "there was a substantial dent in the bourbon and a good bit of the lake was covered with my poems." Wilder then said to him, "Albee, I've read every one of your poems." "I can see that," Albee replied, "They're all out there on the lake." Then Wilder said: "Albee, you should be a playwright."

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Excuse me while I editorialize for a moment:
I loved this story. It's the sort of lyrical event that seems unlikely to happen now. I guess the closest I've come to it was the closing night party of Forced Entertainment's Club of No Regrets in San Francisco in 1997. There was a giddy sort of tribal aspect that took hold that night and things went up in flames - an apocalyptic sort of weinie-roast that just seemed right. When I think about it, even that seems unlikely to happen now. Every thing and every one seem so buttoned up and held in tight. It's all about business and marketing and so little about the enjoyment of each other's company. I admit: that's me. It may not reflect others experience.

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Continuing:
Albee described moving to New York and living in Greenwich Village in the 40's and 50's. He stated, "Nobody was famous, nobody had an agent, nobody was making any money at anything, but everyone was having a great time."

Taccone described the first time he'd read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as being terrifying and disturbing and asked Albee what compelled him to write about the subjects he does and to look at things in such subversive, disturbing ways. "I never think about what it means or about symbolism. I don't get up in the morning and sit down and ask myself how can I be provocative."

Albee described how his writing process works for him - how characters start to form in his subconscious and then move to consciousness. He doesn't rush his plays to the page, instead he prefers to think about them and to let them percolate for awhile. "I wait before I write anything down until I know the characters sufficiently enough."

When he feels that they're "three-dimensional enough," he gives them a test. He comes up with a situation that he knows "isn't going to be in the play and then the characters improvise that." If they can function in the improvisation, then he knows that he's ready to begin writing.

He described himself as an observer. An observer of his life with the ability to both "experience a situation in his life at the same time as being able to step outside of it and observe it from a distance." He stressed the importance for him in writing objectively, not in the heat of passion. His plays are written in "memory of my feelings."



He compared the playwright with a music composer stating that "they used many of the same devices." He feels that a plawright needs to be sensitive to the "arrangement of the silences and the sounds." Albee believes that "a playwright needs to be able to adjust and to hear the sounds of the words on the page as precisely as a composer hears them."



During the Q & A following the conversation, Albee admitted that " My favorite play is always the one I'm writing because it's the only one I haven't fucked up."

When asked what he thought about current theater, he responded, "I don't much like the theater that I see today. So much of it is frivolous and empty." He feels that "life is short and time is valuable" and that "anything we sit down to look at or listen to had better damn well be worth the time." In terms of his own work, "My obligation is to write as truthfully and well as I can. The audience's obligation is to experience a work of art on it's own terms."