Albee died Friday at his home on Long Island, AP cited his assistant as saying, without giving the cause of death.
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Meanwhile, A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women were all awarded Pulitzer Prizes.
Born in Virginia in 1928 and adopted at two weeks by a NY family with whom he never got along, Albee left home at a young age because they objected to his playwriting ambitions. Albee said Turner brought Martha in his play “Virginia Woolf” alive in a way he hadn’t felt since Uta Hagen originated it in the ’60s. He’s pictured above circa 1967 in England, where the Royal Shakespeare Company was performing his play A Delicate Balance.
Albee’s other well-known works include The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, The American Dream and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? His works would eventually rank him alongside Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in American drama.
“All the short stories and poems and essays I’d written were crap”, the writer Michael Riedel recalled Albee having once told him. Albee had a hard childhood and as he would later recall, differed sharply from his adopted parents who, he said, disapproved of his ambition to become a writer instead of a businessman. As the Post noted, the adopted grandson of legendary vaudeville producer Edward F. Albee, the playwright as a young man eschewed his comfortable Westchester upbringing in favor of the bohemian life of a Greenwich Village denizen in the 1950s.
“Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone”, wrote The New York Times’ Ben Brantley, “the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the risky irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death”.
If “The Zoo Story” made Albee a star playwright overnight, “Virginia Woolf” became “the cornerstone of his career”, said Gussow. The first act was based on Albee’s much later “Homelife”.
“Some critics are just morons by nature”, Albee told The New York Times years later.
As for himself, Albee had “no enthusiasm whatever about dying, ” he told the Times as he neared 80.
That year saw the world premiere of his play about identical twins, Me, Myself and I, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey; a NY revival of two of his early one-act classics, The American Dream and The Sandbox; and the premiere of Edward Albee’s Occupant, a piece about sculptor Louise Nevelson and the cult of celebrity.
The same year he was awarded a National Medal of the Arts by then-president Bill Clinton.
For several years, Albee had been working on his latest play, Laying an Egg, which was to be presented at Signature.
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His longtime partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in May 2005.
