In 1959, Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story opened in Berlin alongside one by Samuel Beckett, because he couldn’t get it shown in his native country. It became a hit that changed American theatre. Albee, author of such plays as The American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, recently spoke at Convocation Hall at a benefit hosted by PEN Canada, an organization that promotes freedom of expression for writers and artists. Canadian actors Martha Henry and Martha Burns and Toronto playwright Jason Sherman also appeared.
Albee himself appeared in conversation with Albert Schultz, actor and co-founder of acclaimed Toronto theatre company Soulpepper. Schultz interviewed him about his career and its beginnings in the Greenwich Village scene in the 1950s and 60s. Albee proved charming and funny in person, portraying himself as a failed novelist and poet who found an original voice in playwriting.
Albee eschewed the term Absurdist for his style, although he named Beckett, Ionesco and Genet among his main influences. He called his new play, The Goat, naturalistic in comparison to his older works. The Broadway production contains some of his most shocking material to date. The story centres on a normal, functional family, complete with a comfortably gay son, which nonetheless has one small issue: a father who is madly in love with a goat named Sylvia.
Ironically, Albee said, the audience gasped the loudest at a scene with nothing to do with bestiality. It involves a reconciliatory kiss between father and son that goes on too long. “Fucking the goat is okay, kissing your father is not,” Albee laughed, clearly pleased with himself.
Albee spoke disaffectedly of the critical establishment that has steered his plays’ fluctuating popularity, recalling an older, more powerful New York Times, with the power to close a show with one bad review. He got through that period on his ego alone, he said. Schultz compared the fact that The Zoo Story opened in Berlin with the situation of Canadian playwrights, saying Canadians need recognition in America before they can be noticed in their own country.
Henry and Sherman both spoke about their experiences meeting the “great man” for the first time. Sherman spoke passionately about the theatrical medium, and its ability to “pulsate and take you by the throat.” He described Albee as a man who “inspires you with the breadth, and breath, of his words.”
Henry performed a scene from Albee’s play Three Tall Women during her introduction. The “difficult to navigate” text, as she put it, was the speech of an older woman at her husband’s deathbed. Her character described an absurd sexual moment between them, now made stranger and sadder by the proximity of old age and death.
The obvious sincerity of the admiration in the room was what made the night work. Too many interviews of the Inside the Actor’s Studio variety come off as scripted and fake. Credit also goes to Schultz for giving Albee the spotlight without being derailed by the sometimes facetious answers to his questions. The event, after all, was called “Playwrighter,” and Schultz made sure the evening was all about Albee.
