Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, whose provocative and often brutal look at American life in works such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” earned him a reputation as one of the greatest American dramatists, died on Friday in Montauk, New York.
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While Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was denied the Pulitzer the year it came out (the 14-member advisory board was split, with some shocked at the language and abusive behavior), Albee did win the award for A Delicate Balance in 1967.
Albee’s assistant said he died on Friday, September 16 at his home on Long Island near NY. “As a play-to-play progression, the effect is dismaying; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is to The Ballad of the Sad Café what an icicle is to its melted puddle”, TIME wrote in November 1963. They didn’t want a writer.
‘A writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend self, ‘ he said during his acceptance speech for the 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement.
“Albee’s plays, with their intensity, their grappling with modern themes, and their experiments in form, startled critics and audiences alike while changing the landscape of American drama”, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts says in its biography of the playwright. “I don’t think being gay is a subject, any more than being straight is a subject”, he told a San Francisco conference of gay writers in 1991.
Albee always considered himself a writer first and foremost.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” debuted two years later on Broadway.
Albee, who was openly gay, had been in a longtime relationship with sculptor Jonathan Thomas, until his death in 2005. But it won Albee a Tony Award for Best Play, was adapted into a well-regarded 1966 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and has been revived frequently. 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.
Though known for his temper and irascible nature, Albee also was a famous champion of young playwrights. Running 582 performances, Albee took home Obie and Drama Desk Awards. He also served as a distinguished professor of playwriting at University of Houston.
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He told the NewsHour in 2005 that people expected him to write the same play over and over again.
