Practice What You Preach Three-time Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Edward Albee Walks Line Between Accessibility of His Craft

Author: Chris Richards

As the keynote speaker of this year's Clifford Symposium, "Art Matters: Visions for the Arts in the 21st Century," theater legend Edward Albee commanded a Mead Chapel audience to get into the trenches and fight against what the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright described as "the current withering of the arts." The grateful and enthusiastic crowd was awed by what appeared to be a compassionate and largely improvised speech by the septuagenarian writer, whose challenging and experimental works led critics to describe him as America's answer to Beckett.
While Albee's talents as a playwright have been acknowledged through critical success — Tony Awards, the National Medal of Arts and Kennedy Center Honors — often his role as a social activist and cultural critic have been overshadowed by the strength of his artistry. Internationally renowned writer Harold Pinter described him doubly as a "citizen and playwright." Albee considers himself to be an artist that, borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare, "holds the mirror up to nature," often exposing illusions and hypocrisy within contemporary American life.
Albee emerged as a playwright with the 1960 production of "The Zoo Story" during a period of creative explosion in Greenwich Village, a place where the avante-garde continues to flourish. His early career coincided with an era where artistic exploration and the importance of the arts in society were at a high point. The aging playwright was nostalgic about this time, saying, "Nobody was famous, nobody was rich and everybody was paying attention to each other." Tickets were affordable to anyone who wished to attend the theater and it was significantly cheaper to produce a play. The playwright's most famous work, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", cost merely $42,000 to open on Broadway.
According to Albee, this era of creativity has, in subsequent decades, wilted. "This enthusiasm and innocence has been replaced by the economics of arts in this country." With ticket prices soaring and the cost of major productions rising well into the million dollar range, access to the arts has been altered. "We have created a theater where only a small percentage of the people can go and participate in it," he explained.
Albee attributed the decline in the theater to the sensation that "maybe the theater exposes us to too much self-knowledge."
Advocating a resurgence of the arts in the 21st century, Albee urged the audience to overhaul the current education system. Describing American education as a "two-tiered system where only 5 to 10 percent of the country gets a decent education," he saw a more equitable educational system to be crucial to the survival of the arts and American democracy. Exposure to the arts and nurturing creativity among the youth are necessary to art's survival. Albee said he believes that "art may do nothing, but art determines everything."
While his speech received a standing ovation, to some less convinced Middlebury College community members, the address was nothing but smoke and mirrors. While Albee spoke about the importance of arts, he failed to delve into specifics and never explained the nebulous phrase "art determines everything."
Others in the audience found the speech to be hypocritical, noting that while he complained that art was not being created for the masses but merely for the upper middle class, his plays are often criticized as difficult, erudite and rarely feature characters outside of the upper middle class audience.
Peter Morris, a playwright and theater critic for London's The Guardian and Arete, on perhaps the most critical end of the spectrum, noted in an interview that, "Albee only briefly attended college and has been trying to convince people ever since that he is an intellectual without actually having anything to back it up. Perhaps if he had quit writing in 1967 he would have been an important playwright and we would not have had to suffer through years of incomprehensible rubbish that he passes off as social or intellectual discourse."
During Thursday's speech, after a staged reading of his play "Three Tall Women," Albee discussed the similarity of plays to music and how he strives to attain the qualities of classical composition in his plays. The aim of art to achieve musical qualities has long been an aspiration of artists, particularly in the Victorian era when it was seen as the purest of art forms, so the idea is hardly Albee's invention.
While this criticism may be harsh, it should be noted that Albee was scheduled to speak on "The Playwright vs. The Theatre" and instead gave what appeared to be an improvised speech on the state of the arts. Morris explained that Albee has a history of switching the topics of his speeches at the last moment. The speech he gave here on Thursday night is the exact speech he gave previously at Princeton University, among other colleges that hired him to give an address. At Princeton, Albee nearly gave the same address two years in a row, not realizing he had given the address there already, and quickly changed his appearance to a question and answer session to avoid embarrassment. It is worrying when a speaker with appearance fees as high as Albee's spontaneously decides to speak on something completely different than on the title he had been scheduled or asked to address, and instead chooses to resurrect previous material.
At one point during a question and answer session, Mel Gussow '55, New York Times critic and Albee's biographer, quipped tellingly, "I believe that's the first time I've ever heard you say that particular statement," an indication, perhaps, that everything else that day had been merely repetition of previous answers.
Albee's speech managed to compel many audience members and served as a passionate plea for alterations in our society's regard towards the arts.
With productions on Broadway including this year's Tony Award winner for Best New Play and a resurgence of interest in his work in the past few years, Albee's career is in a renaissance.
His two upcoming works are on prominent gay intellectuals and social activists, Andre Gide and Frederico Garcia Lorca, following his commitment to look at truthful and accurate portrayals of our society.
Though reception to Albee's message was mixed, the playwright will no doubt in the future strive "to hold a mirror up to nature" while wrestling with his critics.