THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW EDWARD ALBEE

...There's more than one way to skin a cat, lots of different interpretations...

...I've had to close down a number of productions that tried to do that play with four men...

...Wait until he gets his second term, if he gets it...

...Despite the gray hair, he doesn't look close to his sixty-eight years...

...Albee: Yes, I considered it a civic responsibility...

...Q: Do you write every day...

...Albee: I may, in my head, before I write things down...

...Q: You have always opposed the commercial pressures and values associated with Broadway...

...But I don't care...

...this is part of the responsibilities of democratic life...

...But nobody remembers that...

...I find the real and planned incursions against our civil liberties frightening and dangerous...

...Q: Ezra Pound...

...Q: Is the legalization of gay marriage an important issue...

...King Lear is about family and family dysfunction...

...Q: Isn't there any good art that's didactic...

...Albee: I don't get asked as much as I did...

...Q: In 1961, you said that we were ruled by "artificial values," and you spoke with contempt of the view "that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy keen...

...Look, one day I'll write a play about a dysfunctional gay marriage...

...The trick is to take the influences and make them so completely you that nobody realizes that you're doing anything else but your own work...

...It's anti-god...

...But yes, I'm a Democrat, though I'm afraid I'm much more of an unreconi...

...Dickens...

...Albee: Well...

...But didacticism belongs in essays...

...Q: You helped to create the Off-Broadway movement in the early 1960s...

...Q: What's the role of comedy in drama...

...We sit on black leather couches in the middle of his extraordinary art collection...

...Albee: I don't make lists...

...I say: I know this stuff—dramatize it for me...

...In Germany it's five or six bucks...

...Perhaps the critics decided that the very successful Angry Young Man needed a lesson in humility...

...Albee: Most serious drama is trying to change people, trying to change their perceptions of consciousness and themselves and their position as sentient animals...

...Albee: Yes...

...Albee: Clinton needs a lot of criticism, but don't let's criticize him so much that Dole gets elected...

...There isn't a day that goes by when I'm not thinking about a new play...

...An Australian aboriginal war axe lies dangerously on the table between us...

...It's part of the responsibility of the playwright to help us see when they're false...

...Anyway, I teach aspiring writers, almost all of whom are liberal because they realize that anything that is not liberal is not going to respect their freedom of speech, freedom of activity...

...They had an emotional involvement and they had a few slogans but they were not informed...

...My God, Nelson Rockefeller would be considered leftwing now...

...Albee: The first time I ever voted was in a New York City mayoral election...

...I do find that the more naturalistic a play is, the more popular it tends to be...

...Brecht maybe...

...Albee: A combination of fear and greed...

...When there's too much didacticism going on I statt sighing...

...A Dogon granary door is propped up just behind the author, a Picasso sketch stands in a frame on a desk, and a Japanese grain-threshing device sits on the floor nearby...

...Wisconsin...

...Albee travels constantly, teaching and lecturing, but in New York he can be found in a cavernous TriBeCa loft, an abandoned cheese warehouse he bought eighteen years ago in the days before cavernous TriBeCa lofts were fashionable...

...Albee: Not only that...

...Richard Farr is a freelance writer and theater critic based in Madison...

...Do you feel uncomfortable with the success that A Delicate Balance is enjoying there now...

...which seems to have been a period when anything was possible in the arts...

...a Republican who was probably not as terrible as all Republicans are these days...

...I'm a great admirer of the revolutionary leftist politics of Jesus Christ, and I am a Christian in the sense that I admire him a great deal...

...Art is dangerous...

...Do you make any conscious effort to radicalize your students...

...The plays that seemed to matter on Broadway this year were very different from what usually wins...

...Albee: I certainly hope so...

...If it can do both, that's wonderful...

...As if the goal is to live life without illusions...

...I can't give you a date, but all of a sudden college students were informed—I don't know by whom—that what you did was graduate, get a cushy job, and vanish into society...

...I just think he's an interesting revolutionary social thinker—and that makes me a Christian, does it not...

...And these arguments that the philistincs come up with wouldn't work if people were educated to want art...

...They all think the National Endowment was the first time anyone had thought of using creative artists for the public good...

...But I don't have any truck with the divinity or with God...

...Then you'll find a much more liberal President because he won't be up for reelection...

...Q: Many of your plays are about families, especially about family dysfunction...

...But none of these things would be allowed to happen if we had a population a) that bothered to vote...

...it's better to live without false illusions, but if you must have them, know that they are false...

...Albee: This has been going on ever since drama was invented...

...Albee continued to produce original drama at the rate of one play per year...

...Q: Do you try to exercise strong control over how your plays are produced...

...This is less money per year than you pay for one pack of cigarettes...

...I don't give them grades on how radical they've become, but I do talk a lot about their responsibilities...

...Q: However, there's a widespread sense that art is realh just entertainment for highbrows...

...None of them originated on Broadway...

...If you don't want to educate yourself, you have a responsibility to educate other people, educate your children...

...The last musical I liked a lot was Evita, because it was politically interesting...

...The way we vote, the way we function as a society, is determined by our sense of ourselves and our consciousness, and to the extent that you can keep people on the edge, alive, alert, and reexamining their values, then they will deal more responsibly with the particular issues...

...Albee said from the start that he hated the commercial values of Broadway, and he was one of the founders of the Off-Broadway movement...

...You learn from people who've come before you and who have done wonderful things...

...Even in a democracy, things like that happen...

...You have to show people things that aren't working well, and why they're not working well, in the hope that people will make them work better...

...Albee: In the second half of the twentieth century things get more complex and it's harder to think of examples...

...I used to like junk musicals when Rodgers and Hart wrote them, and Cole Porter, but then they didn't have any pretense...

...Albee has always been an experimentalist, and he seems not to have cared that some of his work has not been well received...

...All the howling that's taking place in the fens of ignorant Republicanism attacking these supposedly huge grants is preposterous, it seems to me-sinister and cynical and totally fallacious...

...Goya...

...Q: There seem to be Chekhov-like and Beckett-like elements in your plays...

...Q: Is that a criticism...

...For an Absurdist playwright that seems odd...

...Q: Are you working on a play now...

...You can't get away from it...

...So quite selfishly, they are liberal, though how they will vote when they make it I have no idea...

...Albee is a name to reckon with again...

...I'm a troublemaker...

...But the literal writing down of a play—I seldom do that more than three or four months out of the year...

...Q: You have taught at various institutions...

...O'Neill said, in that extraordinary play that nobody does, The Iceman Cometh, that we have to have pipe dreams...

...Q: Do you have an aversion to musicals, in general...

...Why have things gone from there to here...

...Albee: As with all things: When it works, it's fine...

...Q: Many of your plays seem to be about the maintenance or collapse of illusions...

...The only time I really complain is if, either through intention or inattention, the director distorts my play...

...Albee: How old are we, as a country...

...I think Virginia Woolf was in part a response to that...

...Q: So, despite the slough of cultural-conservative despond, you see grounds for optimism...

...The Death of Bessie Smith was a highly political play...

...or any of that stuff...

...Albee has done it again," was the cry, as if the entire theater community had been waiting thirty years to see if the old dog could jump through the hoop one more time...

...Are you influenced by other playwrights...

...The stuff that's on now is supposed to be serious music writing and serious theater, but it's just pretentious, middlebrow junk...

...I see it more and more...

...I do very little rewriting once I write a play down on paper, very little...

...they still think that their responsibility, if they possibly can, is to change the way people think...

...Albee: I always tell actors and directors—whether I'm working with them or not—do whatever you like so long as you end up with the play that I wrote...

...A big problem in this country...

...I never make notes because I make the assumption that anything I can't remember doesn't belong there in the first place...

...Is that because you don't want to seem to be getting up on a soapbox...

...Q: Have your students changed, politically...

...We have to go back to the fundamental responsibilities of democracy...

...He was a messenger for Western Union when, at twenty-nine, he wrote an angry, deeply disturbing one-act play called The Zoo Story, in which a businessman on a park bench is coerced into stabbing a vagrant...

...That happens only after the play is fully formed in my mind: I wait until I can't do anything else but write it down...

...You know, in the thirties there was a huge arts program, for the visual arts especially, where a great generation of abstract painters was put to work decorating public buildings...

...But the atomic family is such a central part of human society...

...Have we slipped further into "artificial values...

...The critics don't like experimental plays generally, and they steer audiences away from them...

...Albee: Which ones...

...structed New Deal Democrat than most, perhaps because that was when I first had some political consciousness...

...Q: What's it like, in these conservative times, to work on NEA grant committees...

...So there was some irony in the relief critics expressed in 1992, when he won another Pulitzer for Three Tall Women...

...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Edward Albee 'If I wrote plays about everyone getting along terribly well, I don't think anyone would want to see them/ by richard farr Despite wealthy adoptive parents who sent him to exclusive schools like Choate, Valley Forge, and Trinity College, playwright Edward Albee didn't have an easy start...

...All serious theater is corrective...

...Q: Why is naturalism a problem artistically...

...it completely distorts the play...

...The play was a sensation, the critics hailed it as the first work of a hugely original talent, and Albee went on to write a series of chilling attacks on the American domestic verities, most notably The American Dream (1961...

...Albee: That may just be a weird oversimplification of something I said at one time...

...is "really" about two gay couples...

...David Hare does write didactic plays: Racing Demon, for instance, which I have retitled, not unaffectionately, Raging Didacticism...

...They don't matter...

...Albee: I do, yes...

...Q: Is there any dominant theme or style emerging...

...Albce: If writing is thinking about writing then I'm writing all the time...

...Q: Does the artist have a duty not to preach politics in his work...

...But it's certainly got to do one of the two...

...Albee: I don't think there's any problem with having false illusions...

...Albee: I have two plays, one that I'm writing now called The Play About the Baby—that's the title of it—which I'm halfway into, and there's another one floating around in my head called The Goat, which very much wants to be written down...

...Q: It has been suggested that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...Some of them will get rich, go to Hollywood, and start voting Republican...

...We don't live up to our responsibilities to democracy...

...and a candidate for the American Labor Party who everyone said was a Communist...

...At eighteen he expelled himself from his parents' home and spent a decade drifting in and out of casual jobs...

...Q: I notice that one of the theater reference books lists your religion as Christian...

...b) that informed itself of the issues...

...Albee: I never feel bad about getting awards...

...There were three candidates: a Democrat who was perfectly OK but a hack...

...Q: Your plays don't express very overtly political sentiments...

...Sometimes it's very overtly political and sometimes very subtly so...

...Albee: We have great diversity of style...

...Q: What is your attitude to marriage and the traditional family...

...But the whole question of what is leftwing has shifted so...

...Q: What's best in contemporary American theater...

...I probably shouldn't because I'll probably get thrown out—we're talking about Texas, where I teach now...

...It's part of the fear of the intellectual in American culture...

...Albee: I've found that any play which isn't close to laughter in the dark is very tedious...

...Critics responded by dismissing nearly all of it as willfully experimental and obscure, and Albee responded to their criticism by dismissing the most powerful New York critics, by name, as know-nothings...

...We have so many good playwrights in America now, a whole new generation...

...Democracy is fragile and it must be made to work, which demands an awful lot of effort on everybody's part...

...The music isn't usually very good...

...I remember a time...

...Q: People are criticizing Clinton for being too conservative...

...Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...We spend about thirty-eight cents per person per year on support of the arts in this country...

...Mind you, my playwriting students haven't figured it all out yet...

...Albee: Even back in the "activist" sixties and seventies I would talk to a lot of students and most of them couldn't argue dialectics for more than thirty seconds...

...I dislike it a lot...

...there are exceptions...

...Q: Would you describe yourself as a capital-D Democrat...

...Albee: Theater audiences have been trained towards naturalism...

...Albee: Why do you ask...

...They still think that individuality has some virtue...

...Q: Did you enjoy them...

...Q: Do you do much rewriting...

...When it doesn't, do away with it...

...Q: But some playwrights don't focus on the family so much...

...I always leave somebody good out...

...I think we'll survive Gingrich and Dole...

...I also served for a while on the New York State Council for the Arts, but I was equally vocal there, and I'm not invited to do those things too much now...

...Two hundred years...

...Certainly The American Dream was socially involved...

...And conversely, even the purest comedy, if it isn't just telling jokes, has got to be tied to reality in some way...

...Changing a man into a woman is more than interpretation: It's fucking around with what the playwright intended...

...Nothing new about it...

...I not only voted for the American Labor Party once, I also voted Republic can once—no, twice—to get Javits reelected...

...It's obscene...

...Sometimes it's subtle and sometimes it's fairly obvious...

...The problem is with kidding yourself that they're not false...

...So maybe something better is happening, though I think it's a little strange...

...And I do often mention right at the beginning that there isn't a single creative artist whose work I respect who has been anything other than a liberal...

...Albee: I think it's a bastard art form...

...if they're giving out awards, I'd like to have them...

...A lot of the writing is in the unconscious...

...It's about the way wc treat old people, the way we destroy our children, the way we don't communicate with each other...

...He was actually a leftwing socialist, and he was the only person who a sensible person could have voted for...

...A Delicate Balance has just celebrated its thirtieth birthday on Broadway by winning three Tony awards, including Best Revival...

...The so-called religious right of the Republican Party—the Christian right, they call themselves, although in my view they are neither Christian nor right—is after a totalitarian state...

...I think a play should do one of two things, and ideally both: It should change our perceptions about ourselves and about consciousness, and it should also broaden the possibilities of drama...

...Albee: If I had wanted to write a play about two gay couples, I would have done it...

...The pressures that were put on us occasionally to find as many worthwhile sculptors in North Dakota as there were in Brooklyn—well, I'm in favor of populism within rational limits, but...

...1962), and A Delicate Balance (1966)—which won Albee his first Pulitzer prize...

...After 1966 his reputation went into a quarter-century tailspin, as each new offering "failed" to live up to the promise of the early work...

...It doesn't make any sense...

...Albee: I do think that all of my plays are socially involved, but sometimes very subtly and very indirectly...

...Oedipus Rex is about family and family dysfunction...

...And a lot of writers was put to work in schools...

...Albee: I think we've slipped a lot further...

...He was expelled from most of the schools, or expelled himself...

...and c) that understood that democracy is a participatory governmental system...