Edward Albee: Who's afraid of controversy? Not this playwright

Edward Albee is famous for, among other things, writing the most notorious non-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama in history: the 1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof? (Pulitzer judge W.D. Maxwell considered the play "filthy," causing several committee members to resign in protest) It did no lasting harm to Albee, who eventually went on to win three Pulitzers, anyway--for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994)--and who shows no sign of slowing down. His play about sculptor Louise Nevelson, Occupant, has just opened at Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre (starring Anne Bancro-ft), and The Goat or Who is Sylvia? opens this month on Broadway, starring Mercedes Ruehl and Bill Pullman.

STEVEN DRUKMAN: The first time we met, I told you I had just finished the first draft of my first play, and you gave me some advice, which I followed.

EDWARD ALBEE: Sorry.

SD: [laughs] It was, "Don't let your characters be flags in a parade."

EA: That's not bad.

SD: It's good advice for a journalist who's trying to become a playwright, to not impose his voice on the characters. You said, "Let your unconscious seep through."

EA: Mm-hmm. That makes sense.

SD: It's interesting for people to learn about your particular process of writing a play.

EA: It's very simple. I discover that I am thinking about a play. I am not a person who gets ideas for a play: "Oh now, wouldn't it be good to write a play about this." I write the plays to find out why I'm writing them. I'm aware that I'm "with play" and usually it comes to term. By the time I've finished the piece I've gotten so involved with the reality of it that I don't think much about what caused it.

SD: I hear characters speaking in my head. Does that happen to you?

EA: Yes. I conduct an experiment to find out how well I know my characters. I will take a walk on the beach and think up some situation that can't be in the play that I'm planning to write, and for a half hour or so I'll walk around with my characters, making them improvise dialogue for that situation. And if I can see and hear them existing three-dimensionally in an improvised situation, that indicates to me I probably know them fairly well, and maybe I can trust them to be in my play.

SD: So I would imagine you'd do less rewriting than most playwrights would.

EA: Yes. I wait a long time before I write the play down. I trust my intuition and don't rewrite very much. Like everybody else I write a little too much and get carried away with the sound of my own voice, but I can cut. And I've learned one other important thing: If you have some notion as to where you're going, and in the middle of the play you find out that it's changing, trust your intuition.

SD: I wonder how that translates to your teaching, because it's very hard to teach someone to let the unconscious seep out.

EA: I can't teach anybody to be a playwright. But I can help them think coherently as playwrights, and help push them in the direction of understanding how their creativity should work. That's all I do. I tell my students, not only should you know everything anybody else has ever written, you should know the bad stuff as well as the good. Because you don't want to be influenced by the bad stuff. You should also note the history of classical music, since you're writing stuff that is to be spoken and heard; and since you're also working with visual images, you should know about painting and sculpture.

SD: Tell me about Occupant, your new play about Louise Nevelson.

EA: It is the life story of a girl born in Russia in 1899 named Leah Berliawsky, whose father came to Maine, started a junk store and brought over his family. She realized that she was moved by the arts and started drawing when she was very, very young. Over the years, Leah invented and created and became Louise Nevelson, the sculptor. She made lots of mistakes along the way--a marriage she shouldn't have made, kids she didn't want. Then she abandoned all of that and went to Europe, living a hand-to-mouth bohemian existence, going to art schools and being rejected for 35 years or so until finally she became one of the most famous sculptors in America.

SD: And she was a friend of yours?

EA: Oh yeah. We knew each other for 25 years or so. I'm interested in how people create themselves. All artists do it. I told a lot of visual artists that I was doing this play and they said, "That fascinates me--how we do that, how we become our art." I wrote the play in two months.

SD: Really?

KA: Yeah. It just sort of flowed beautifully.

SD: Now with your other new play, The Goat, I think it was about three years ago when I saw it in your notebook.

EA: I was beginning it then, and I finished it about a year and a half ago. [sigh] What can I tell you about it? It's one long act, three scenes, four characters and a goat.

SD: [laughs] Well, that's a beginning. You told me it was your most overtly political play.