Edward Albee : The Absurdist Perspective In His Plays

Book excerpt: Edward Albee (b. 1928) is recognized as one of the major American dramatists of our time. He is considered the most powerful and controversial writer of America after the eras of O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Critical assessments of his work as a playwright vary from passionate applause to downright denigration. He has occasioned critical responses proving himself an enigma for critics, scholars and reviewers who have failed to reach a consensus on him as a playwright. Robert Brustein, one of America’s leading theatrical observers, displayed an arbitrary mentality of astounding presumptuousness in a review of The Zoo Story printed in Seasons of Discontent (1966) and hinted at a ‘masochistic-homosexual perfume’ in it. Similarly, in approaching The American Dream and Death of Bessie Smith, he adopted a dismissive attitude and felt only the slightest obligation to discuss the plays, preferring to attack the general decadence of American theatre. Martin Esslin precipitated a host of articles in which Albee was alternately praised and denounced for his success or failure. Philip Roth assailed him for writing ‘thinly-veiled homosexual fantasies’. Richard Schechner’s violent denunciation is based on the ‘morbidity and sexual perversity’ in Albee’s first three-act play. He dismissed the playwright as a ‘plague in our midst’ and a ‘corrosive influence on our theatre’. Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? invited the adverse remark as “a filthy play.” There are other critics as Gerald Weals, Brian Way, Rose A. Zimbardo, Gilbert Debusscher, Alan Schneider, Harold Clurman, Diana Trilling, Michael E. Rutenberg, Anne Paolucci, C.W.E. Bigsby, Richard E. Amacher etc., who have approached the plays of Edward Albee and expressed their views in favour of or against , them. To record all that has been said on Albee and his plays, or to give a survey of the critical material on Albee, the dramatist, is not possible in the limited space at my disposal here. Further, the present study is not intended to establish the reputation of Albee. Its direct and main drive is to analyze and expose the Absurdist themes which form the fundamentals of his significant plays.