Edward Albee

Edward Albee (Washington, D.C., 1928 - Montauk, New York, 2016) was an American playwright who brought the European avant-garde of the postwar years to audiences in his own country. His significance lies in taking the Theatre of the Absurd and reshaping it for American life, with sharp dialogue and a critical eye on modern existence.

Albee was born in Washington but was placed for adoption shortly afterwards and grew up in Larchmont, New York. His adoptive family was wealthy: his adoptive father was the son of a vaudeville magnate and owned several theatres. Relations with his parents were strained, and Albee later described that home as suffocating. He moved through several schools without completing any successfully and left home in his late teens. He settled in New York's Greenwich Village, where he took odd jobs while learning to write plays.

His first play, The Zoo Story, was staged in Berlin before reaching New York, and together with The Sandbox (1959) it marked his first steps within the absurdist tradition, featuring characters who challenged the conventions of traditional marriage and criticised the American Dream. Yet it was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) that made him a central figure of American theatre. Its long night between two couples, full of cruel games and half-truths, ran on Broadway for almost two years and won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963. The 1966 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols, brought the story to a far wider audience.

His career was not a straight line. In the 1970s and 1980s his plays received mixed reviews, and much of his work premiered outside Broadway, in regional theatres and in Europe. Albee explored maturity, marriage, death and sexual relationships with a blend of irony and bluntness. Seascape (1975) earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and Three Tall Women (1991) earned another, a meditation on old age and memory that critics saw as a period of renewal. In all he won three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

Beyond the stage, Albee was an active promoter of university theatre and taught playwriting at the University of Houston. In 1967 he founded a foundation with the royalties from his most famous play, aimed at giving writers and visual artists time and space in Montauk. His legacy can be seen in later American playwrights such as Paula Vogel, who credit his mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent postwar American theatre.