– Three-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and author of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Edward Albee died on Friday at the age of 88 in his home on Long Island, United States. He was expelled from three schools before moving to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and wrote his first play The Zoo Story at 30, making his Broadway debut with Virginia Woolf three years later, in 1962.
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“To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.”
Born March 12, 1928, Albee was adopted shortly thereafter and grew up in Larchmont, N.Y.
Actress Mia Farrow said: “Edward Albee was one of the great playwrights of our time”.
Albee spent much of the 1950s writing poetry and fiction, before turning his hand to plays.
Albee described a playwright as “someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage”, and the innards of his own works included a powerful anger as he pushed themes such as alienation, resentment and the dark underside of life in the 1950s.
In addition, his later works, The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? earned him nominations in 2001 and 2003, respectively. A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, “The Zoo Story” zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench. The play had its 1991 premiere in Vienna but earned Albee a third Pulitzer after it appeared off-Broadway in 1994. The work was most recently revived on Broadway in 2012 with Amy Morton and Tracy Letts. The shattering encounter between two strangers in a park – the aggressive, nearly psychotic Jerry and the bland, middle-aged Peter – that is “The Zoo Story” became the second act of the new work.
Albee always considered himself a writer first and foremost.
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Clockwise from center, Maria Tallchief, Johnny Cash, Edward Albee, Jack Lemmon and Benny Carter are at the 19th annual presentation of The Kennedy Center Honors.
