If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that’s their problem as much as mine. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number. One of the local reviewers, after Malcolm came out, referred to it as Edward Albee’s “play of the year,” rather as if to suggest that this is a conscious goal you’ve set for yourself, to have a play ready every year.ĭo you remember the Thurber cartoon of the man looking at his police dog and saying, “If you’re a police dog, where’s your badge?” It’s the function of a playwright to write. I’ve done adaptations for two reasons: first, to examine the entire problem of adaptation-to see what it felt like and second, because I admired those two books- The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm-very much and thought they belonged on the stage I wanted to see them on the stage, and felt more confident, perhaps incorrectly, in my own ability to put them on the stage than in most adapters’. Regarding adaptations in general, can you think of any by American playwrights that you admire at all? And a playwright, especially a playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he should pay some attention to the nature of the audience response-not necessarily to learn anything about his craft, but as often as not merely to find out about the temper of the time, what is being tolerated, what is being permitted. Every writer’s got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work. I imagine that if we had a college of criticism in this country whose opinions more closely approximated the value of the works of art inspected, it might but as often as not, I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets. While it doesn’t necessarily change your feeling, does the unanimously bad critical response open questions in your mind? With the possible exception of the little play The Sandbox, which takes thirteen minutes to perform, I don’t think anything I’ve done has worked out to perfection. I had a number of quarrels with the production, but then I usually end up with quarrels about all of my plays. I liked doing the adaptation of Purdy’s book.
I haven’t changed my feeling about Malcolm. I don’t feel intimidated by either the unanimously bad press that Malcolm got or the unanimously good press that some of the other plays have received.
Well, I retain for all my plays, I suppose, a certain amount of enthusiasm. The resultant commercial catastrophe and quick closing of the play apart, how does this affect your own feeling about the piece itself? It had as close to one hundred percent bad notices as a play could get. One of your most recent plays was an adaptation of James Purdy’s novel Malcolm. But Albee’s barbed, poised, and elegantly guarded public press style took over after the phrasing of the first question-though perhaps it was intermittently penetrated during the course of the talk. The interviewer and subject have been both friends and composer-writer collaborators for about eighteen years. He appeared, as the climate of the afternoon demanded, somewhat uncomfortable. He was as yet unshaven for the day and his neo-Edwardian haircut was damply askew.
Still, it is in his country house that he generally seems most at ease, natural, at home.Īlbee was dressed with a mildly ungroomed informality. With the exception of a handsome, newly built tennis court (in which the playwright takes a disarmingly childlike pleasure and pride) and an incongruously grand Henry Moore sculpture situated high on a landscaped terrace that commands a startling view of the sea, the simplicity of the place leaves one with the curious impression that the news of the personal wealth his work has brought him has not quite reached the playwright-in-residence at Montauk. Keeping in mind his luxuriously appointed house in New York City’s Greenwich Village, one finds the country place dramatically modest by comparison. The interview happened on a scalding, soggy-aired Fourth of July in a sunny room in Albee’s small, attractive country house in Montauk, Long Island. Interviewed by William Flanagan Issue 39, Fall 1966