Edward albee (1928-)

The Theatre of the Absurd

EDWARD ALBEE (1928-)

In the 1950s a new kind of drama was developing in Europe. Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), and Jean Genet’s The Balcony (19569 all shared characteristics that radically departed from the realistic-naturalistic dramatic idiom prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic in the first half of the twentieth century. In his groundbreaking book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) Martin Esslin claims that the dramatic methods used by this new group of dramatists can be judged by the standards of the Theatre of the Absurd since they radically transformed essential elements of drama such as plot, character, and dialogue. An absurdist play lacks a story or plot; the characters are rather mechanical puppets; instead of a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved in a realist play, an absurdist drama often neither has a beginning nor an end. Witty repartee and pointed dialogues are replaced with incoherent babblings.

As regards the meaning of absurd, it originally means out of harmony in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: out of harmony with reason or propriety, incongruous, unreasonable, and illogical. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defines his understanding of the term as follows: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose . . . Cut off from religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (qtd. in Esslin 23). This sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition lies at the core of the plays of the European absurdist playwrights. With the translation of the above plays into English and their productions in America the interest in the theater of the absurd mushroomed and inevitably, a new generation of American playwrights appeared on the American scene. Jack Gelber (1932-2003) and Edward Albee are traditionally considered the major representatives of the theatre of the absurd in US, while a large number of dramatists who started their careers in the 1960s (Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Megan Terry, to mention only a few) was influenced by the Off-Broadway productions of absurdist drama, especially in their movement away from the conventions of dramatic realism.

It must be noted though, that the European kind of absurdism (that springs from deep disillusionment, the draining away of the sense of meaning and purpose in life) never really took root in postwar America. As Christopher Bigsby points out, America was ill suited to the absurd in a number of respects:

1. 
   its actor-training (based on the Stanislavski method) was committed to psychological veracity;
   
2. 
   its theatrical tradition was at odds with the absurd’s denial of social conflict;
   
3. 
   the absurd was in radical conflict with basic American myths having to do with the integral self and the inevitability of progress.
   

Accordingly, both Jack Gelber and Edward Albee bore the marks of the absurd but neither, finally settled for its radical revisioning. Yet, certain innovative dramatic forms certainly flourished in their works: character and plot were drained of content, characters were often presented as mere puppets, language was deformed by context, there was a clear abandonment of rational devices, structures, and a discursive thought (Albee’s The Zoo Story, 1959, The American Dream, 1960, Gelber’s The Connections, 1959).
EDWARD ALBEE burst onto the American theatrical scene in the late 1950s with a variety of plays that detailed the agonies and disillusionment of that decade and the transition from the placid Eisenhower years to the turbulent 1960s. Albee’s plays with their intensity, their grappling with modern themes, and their experiments in form, startled critics and audiences alike while changing the landscape of American drama. Albee’s 31 plays form a body of work that is recognized as unique, uncompromising, controversial, elliptical, and provocative. Although hailed as America’s finest playwright of the “theater of the absurd,” Albee went on to write plays that diverged from the absurdist formula. His widely recognized successful play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), for instance is written in the realistic tradition of O’Neill and Arthur Miller. Nonetheless, Albee can be seen as an absurdist in a uniquely American tradition, which not surprisingly, given America’s Puritan heritage, comes with a strong moral component. It is somewhat paradoxical that throughout his career Albee insisted that his plays were all written with serious social aims. In 1985 he repeated in an interview many of the points ha had made before:

Directly or indirectly any playwright is a kind of demonic social critic. I am concerned with altering people’s perceptions, altering the status quo. All serious art interest itself in this. The self, the society should be altered by a good play. All plays in their essence are indirectly political in that they make people question the values that move them to make various parochial, social, and political decisions. Our political decisions are really a result of how we view consciousness. Plays should be relentless; the playwright shouldn’t let people off the hook. He should examine their lives and keep hammering away at the fact that some people are not fully participating in their lives and therefore they’re not participating with great intelligence in politics, in social intercourse, in aesthetics. It’s something that I dearly hope runs through all of my plays.


LIFE: He was brought up from infancy by wealthy foster parents who apparently gave him more material than emotional security. He was born somewhere in Virginia in 1928 to parents who handed him over for adoption to Reed and Frances Albee, rich socialites with connections to the theater. The year of Albee’s adoption, his adoptive father retired t a life of leisure and luxury in their manor in Larchmont, New York. Albee was often taken in a chauffeured limousine to see plays on Broadway. His schooling was erratic. His parents traveled to Florida and Arizona in the winters and sent Albee to a series of boarding schools. He was unhappy and unruly in all of them. He was mainly interested in writing poetry, but he also wrote stories and plays. One of his plays appeared in the school magazine, one of his poems was published in a literary journal. In 1946 he entered Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, but left after a little over a year. Albee departed from home in 1950 and headed for Greenwich Village, determined to make it his own. He had, however, a small income from a $200,000 trust fund left him by his grandmother. He supplemented it by working at a series of menial jobs—office boy, salesman, and a counter-man in a luncheonette. In 1952 he went to Italy, where he wrote poetry and fiction for a time. Returning to the U.S. and still an unknown author, he worked as a messenger for Western Union (1955058). When he saw himself reaching 30 without having made a name for himself as a writer, he became despondent—but the despondency triggered his creative energies and he wrote his first successful play in three weeks:--The Zoo Story.
Some of Albee’s best-known plays, especially The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960), are absurdist in the obvious way that much of Beckett’s and Ionesco’s work is. Put in its simplest terms, this kind of writing echoes the meaninglessness (therefore the absurdity) of human existence in the form of the work itself. An apparently senseless world is echoed in a senseless imitation; form is meaning, or nonmeaning. Neither the American Dream nor The Sandbox bothers to be realistic or illusionistic in the sense of depicting life as it appears to ordinary vision.

In The Sandbox and The American Dream the principal characters are “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Grandma,” and “Young Man”—all involved in banal conversations and weird situations. “Mommy” and “Daddy” are symbolic American parents imprisoned in their stereotypical thinking and clichéd language, completely devoid of human feeling and compassion for “Grandma” and for a son, “a clean-cut Midwest farm boy type.”

Albee has famously claimed that his play The American Dream is “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” The mutation of American values into unselfconscious egotism and intellectual vacuity is most evident in the character of Mommy.

From the very beginning of the play, Mommy shows her superficiality when she tells her husband about her purchase of a beige hat that she returns to the shop because the leader of her social club argued that it was wheat-colored. The seemingly benign act of buying a hat becomes a dramatization of the ridiculousness of a society that is conditioned to expect “satisfaction” (Albee) in every detail. From Grandma’s stories we learn that from the moment of her childhood Mommy valued money and social standing over all else. She used to say: “When I gwo up, I’m going to Mahwy a wich old man, I’m going to sit my wittle were end wight down in a tub o’ butter, that’s what I’m going to do” (Albee).

Apparently immune to substance, Mommy married Daddy not for love, but for what he had—or, more accurately, for what he could provide to her. Clearly, Mommy’s desire for comfort and her willingness to ignore any substantive relationship serve as a warning to the American audience that social prostitution and obsession with material goods at the expense of real relationships lead only to dissatisfaction.

Mommy’s treatment of Grandma throughout the play underscores the insensitivity of a society in which the individuals are conditioned to think only of their own satisfaction. Mommy would simply like to dispose of Grandma—her own mother—though Mommy asserts that she loves Grandma. Mommy would like to cart Grandma off to an institution or if she does not behave, she will “taken away in a van” (Albee). According to Mommy old people have nothing to say, though it is Grandma who provides the closest thing to wisdom in the play.

Mommy’s two children—one aborted and the other “unable to love”—emblematic of the natural tragedy engendered by a generation of hollow materialism. The second child—the “bumble joy” whom Mommy and Daddy adopted (rather purchased) to be their own child—is also shallow, materialistic, and ultimately useless. He admits himself to having no skill other than looking good, which makes him a prostitute born out of the same self-serving attitude that characterizes Mommy. He is the inevitable product of Mommy’s vain obsession with appearance over substance.

By the end of the play mommy serves as a warning of the dangers of consumerism and self-indulgence. She represents all that is worst about American’s zealous capitalism and stands as an omen of might happen, should Americans capitulate to the pressures of crass consumerism. In our push to satisfy our own pleasures, in our vain attempts to “get satisfaction” (Albee), Americans might end up killing our own better selves in the process.