‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ also broke new ground for acceptable content in film, featuring a higher level of strong language and sexual content than was previously allowed in a studio production.
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Albee, who was gay, died Friday at his home in Montauk, on New York’s Long Island, after a brief illnes, The New York Times reports.
Beginning in the late 1950s with the one-act play The Zoo Story, Albee transformed the landscape of the American theater just as Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had done before him.
In more than 25 plays Albee probed American culture, poking and prodding social mores with his shocking and sharp-tongued wit.
Theater colleagues expressed their sadness at Albee’s death, with many taking to Twitter to send their condolences. “I am a writer who happens to be gay”, he said, somewhat ironically, while accepting an award for pioneering LGBT writers and publishers.
He received Pulitzer Prizes – America’s most prestigious literary award – for his plays Seascape, Three Tall Women and A Delicate Balance, which was filmed in 1973 with Paul Scofield and Katherine Hepburn.
Albee was adopted shortly after birth by a wealthy NY family that sent him to elite schools – two of which expelled him – but he had no desire for social status. Off-Broadway, he was well-represented at Signature Theatre Company with revivals of his plays Occupant and The Lady From Dubuque, and premieres of Me, Myself & I at Playwrights Horizons in 2010, as well as a prequel to The Zoo Story in 2007 at Second Stage Theatre, presented as Peter and Jerry. “People stopped coming to them, but I never stopped writing them”.
Playwright Edward Albee accepts the 2002 Tony Award for best play for his work The Goat or Who is Sylvia.
Adina Porter wrote on Twitter: “Edward Albee & THANK YOU for sharing your genius with we mortals”. Albee wrote the script for the movie version of “A Delicate Balance”, which starred Katharine Hepburn, Lee Remick and Joseph Cotten. Albee spent many years teaching playwriting at the University of Houston.
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He was born Edward Harvey on March 12, … His longest relationship was with sculptor Jonathan Thomas, his partner from 1971 until Thomas’s death in 2005, notes The Washington Post. “I am a writer who is gay”, he said at the ceremony. “But then I got back into a feeling of usefulness”. “If it’s merely decorative, it’s a waste of time”.
