Twentieth Century American Literature: Edward Albee

Description

The landmark Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism, first published in the 1980s, is one of the most impressive collections of literary criticism ever produced. It is now available in digital format for the first time. This volume of the series provides excerpts and full-length critical essays on the playwright Edward Albee.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• 20th Century
• América
• Literature
• American
• Edward Albee

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781685661175
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Twentieth Century American Literature: Edward Albee
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Contents Chapters From Pilate s Chair (excerpt on Edward Albee) Chinese Boxes (excerpt on Edward Albee) In the Bosom of the Family: Contradiction and Resolution in Edward Albee (excerpt) The Verbal Murders of Edward Albee (excerpt) Saturday Review (excerpt on Edward Albee) "The Zoo Story and Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape" (excerpt on Edward Albee) The Theatre of the Absurd (excerpt on Edward Albee) Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (excerpt) The Art of Total No (excerpt on Edward Albee) The Theatre of Protest and Paradox (excerpt on Edward Albee's The Zoo Story) Drama Survey (excerpt on Edward Albee) Interview with William Flanagan (excerpt on Edward Albee) Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal (excerpt) Fragments from a Cultural Explosion (excerpt on Edward Albee) "The American Dream" (excerpt on Edward Albee) Edward Albee: An American Dream? (excerpt) The Theatre of Protest and Paradox (excerpt on Edward Albee's The American Dream) Who s Afraid of Edward Albee? (excerpt) Why So Afraid? (excerpt on Edward Albee) "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (excerpt on Edward Albee) The Theatre of Protest and Paradox (excerpt on Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) From Tension to Tonic (excerpt on Edward Albee) Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (excerpt) Tiny Alice; Hughie (excerpt on Edward Albee) Three Playwrights and a Protest (excerpt on Edward Albee) "Tiny Alice" (excerpt on Edward Albee) The Play That Dare Not Speak Its Name (excerpt on Edward Albee) The Theatre of Protest and Paradox (excerpt on Edward Albee's Tiny Alice) Albee Decorates an Old House: A Delicate Balance (excerpt) Hudson Review (excerpt on Edward Albee) Albee at the Crossroads (excerpt) "Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung: Albee's Diptych" (excerpt) New Republic (excerpt on Edward Albee) Albee s End Game (excerpt) Plays and Players (excerpt on Edward Albee) To the Brink of the Grave: Edward Albee's All Over (excerpt) Leapin Lizards (excerpt on Edward Albee) Evolution Made Queasy (excerpt on Edward Albee) Self-Parody and Self-Murder (excerpt on Edward Albee) From Hunger, Not Dubuque (excerpt on Edward Albee) Who's Afraid of Vladimir Nabokov?: Edward Albee's Lolita (excerpt) Edward Albee: Don t Make Waves
Chapters
From Pilate's Chair (excerpt on Edward Albee)
1962

It is incredible to consider that on the basis of four plays, one little more than a fragment, Edward Albee, the enfant terrible of America's avant garde, is being seriously considered in many quarters as a genuinely important playwright. The same critics and theorists who deny Thornton Wilder his legitimate right to be called a great playwright because he has written so little are ready to canonize young Albee as the greatest thing in modern drama.
This neatly tailored young man, who sounds quite rational and even personable, writes like a bomb-carrying anarchist. Without benefit of beret and red armband he seems to be principal among the new iconoclasts in our theatre. This group, claiming some inspiration from Ionesco, causing many a theatre-goer to shake his head in helpless bewilderment, seek, it seems, to shake the contemporary theatre to its roots, to put mystery back on a stage that has become enamored of fact and completely captivated by obvious formulae —a theatre which to them has become ossified.…
Undoubtedly the avant gardist, and Albee here provides a fortunate case in point, has an axe to grind. He is original—terrifically original—and in his originality, extreme as it may often be, lies his strength. Nevertheless, it is difficult to peer through the smokescreen of paradox to see whether or not he really has something to say. In the theatre the audience doesn't bother to comprehend unless the playwright, within the generally accepted and known conventions of the stage, says what he has to say in a reasonably overt manner. No audience can sit happily guessing as to what the playwright means.…
The avant gardist despairs of the modern theatre's technique and it is at this point we can scream derision at the precocious band who would level our theatre and render it a grotesque playground of their own devising. One needn't argue with their position that our modern world is a piteous place, constipated with egocentricity and bilious with smugness. We can accept this analysis and we can cheer any sincere and well-chosen efforts taken to better it. We can question the means, however, and it is in the means that the commendable objectives of some of the avant gardists (like Albee who does not appear a nihilist) are tragically betrayed.
In these cases, and let's use Albee for an example, we can note that he neither lectures interestingly like Brecht, delights and outrages like Shaw, nor sings like O'Casey as he slings his thunderbolts into the world's teeth. He fails dismally in getting his audiences up and outside themselves. He only slaps them back into the lonely cell of ego where they must dwell unfulfilled and in spineless terror. Albee is too busy indulging in private ironies to share with the humble generosity that is inevitably present in an artist who is earnest and true.…
Albee's theatre gives nothing. It seeks attention in return for the dry crust of a spurious mystery. A concatenation of the same non sequiturs and banalities one hears on the street are poor payment indeed for those who come to the theatre.…
Edward Albee, brash young novice, has torn off the white veil of humility and is confidently belching in the sanctuary of art. He writes for the narrow audience, an audience far removed from the broad pastures of grassroots participation where great plays are grown. His Zoo Story, following the hysterical indictments of conformity and self-isolation contributed by some of the European avant gardists, really paves the way for a new and insidious kind of conformism—one in which personal responsibility and the inexorable obligations occasioned by man's social nature are trampled under by the new herd.
It is a sad thing to see a young man—even one as intellectually complacent and self satisfied as Albee appears to be—given … adulation so early. Adulation that allows him to evade, even within himself, the problem of self-justification. Many a potential talent has been ruined by the flush of early success, and though to this date Albee has achieved only limited production in small theatres and under one management, he has been widely lionized as the champion of the new stage form, as the beardless young prophet who will deliver our theatre from the old nasty ways.
Perhaps if he takes the trouble to master his craft, if he builds endurance for his short-winded muse, if he correlates his natural ear for modern speech to something rational and truly dramatic, he will in time become a playwright to reckon with. He may even become the theatrical Messias for which the American theatre stands waiting.
Entry Author: Duprey, Richard A.
Source: Just off the Aisle, 1962, pp. 74–80.
Chinese Boxes (excerpt on Edward Albee)
1971

(In) Edward Albee's work, we see a tension between realism and the theatre of the absurd. The Death of Bessie Smith is a purely realistic play, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is, for all its showiness, no more than a cross between sick drawing-room comedy and naturalistic tragedy. The Zoo Story, The Sandbox and The American Dream are, on the face of it, absurd plays, and yet, if one compares them with the work of Beckett, Ionesco or Pinter, they all retreat from the full implications of the absurd when a certain point is reached. Albee still believes in the validity of reason—that things can be proved, or that events can be shown to have definite meanings—and, unlike Beckett and the others, is scarcely touched by the sense of living in an absurd universe. Interesting and important as his plays are, his compromise seems ultimately a failure of nerve—a concession to those complementary impulses towards cruelty and self-pity which are never far below the surface of his work.
Albee has been attracted to the theatre of the absurd mainly, I think, because of the kind of social criticism he is engaged in. Both The Zoo Story and The American Dream are savage attacks on the American Way of Life.…
The American Way of Life, in the sense in which I am using the phrase, is a structure of images; and the images, through commercial and political exploitation, have lost much of their meaning. When the Eisenhower family at prayer becomes a televised political stunt, or the family meal an opportunity for advertising frozen foods, the image of the family is shockingly devalued. The deception practised is more complex than a simple lie: it involves a denial of our normal assumptions about evidence—about the relation between the observed world and its inner reality. This is why the techniques of the theatre of the absurd, which is itself preoccupied with the devaluation of language and of images, and with the deceptive nature of appearances, are so ideally suited to the kind of social criticism Albee intends. It is for this reason, too, that he has felt able to use the techniques of the theatre of the absurd, while stopping short of an acceptance of the metaphysic of the absurd upon which the techniques are based. It is possible, clearly, to see the absurd character of certain social situations without believing that the whole life is absurd. In Albee's case, how