In so doing, he has grown into a major voice in dramatic literature, the progress of whose career in itself reflects his overriding theme: No emotional or artistic or spiritual growth is possible without embracing the terror-and perhaps the glory-of tomorrow’s unknown, for the unknown is contemporary humanity’s only certainty. Instead, he has continued to experiment with dramatic form, to venture into new structures and styles. The outlook in his later works, however, is more that of the compassionate moralist, linking him-perhaps unexpectedly-with Anton Chekhov one of the characters in All Over, recognizing the disparity between what human beings could become and what they have settled for, even echoes the Russian master’s Madame Ranevsky when she says, “How dull our lives are.” Even in his most technically and stylistically avant-garde dramas, however, Albee remains essentially very traditional in the values he espouses, as he underlines the necessity for human contact and communion, for family ties and friendships, which provide individuals with the courage to grow and face the unknown.Īlways prodding people to become more, yet, at the same time, sympathetically accepting their fear and anxiety over change, Albee has increasingly become a gentle apologist for human beings, who need one crutch after another, who need one illusion after another, so that-in a paraphrase of O’Neill’s words-they can make it through life and comfort their fears of death.ĭespite a lengthy career that has, especially in its second half, been marked by more critical downs than ups, Albee has not been satisfied to rest on his successes, such as Who’s Afraid of VirginiaWoolf? nor has he been content simply to repeat the formulas that have worked for him in the past. Eliot, Beckett, and Harold Pinter, as well as the recessive action and lack of definite resolution and closure often found in Beckett and Pinter.Īs the only avant-garde American dramatist of his generation to attain a wide measure of popular success, Albee sometimes demonstrates, especially in the plays from the first decade of his career, the rather strident and accusatory voice of the angry young man.
Yet the influence of Eugène Ionesco’s humor and of Jean Genet’s rituals can be discerned in isolated works, as can the battle of the sexes and the voracious, emasculating female from August Strindberg, the illusion/ reality motif from Luigi Pirandello and O’Neill, and the poetic language of T. Though he is touted sometimes as the chief American practitioner of the absurd in drama, Edward Albee (Ma– September 16, 2016) only rarely combines in a single work both the techniques and the philosophy associated with that movement and is seldom as unremittingly bleak and despairing an author as Beckett.
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