March 8 - 14, 2002 Sleepless
in New York Bill
Pullman on Broadway by
Steven Leigh Morris |
| From
this spot on Tribeca’s Greenwich Street, you can look out across the Hudson River to
New Jersey. At a quarter to 10 in the morning, there are few pedestrians about and not
much traffic either, and the new sun fails to blunt the cold stab of a brisk breeze. A
pair of chilled Dalmatians, tied to a bicycle rack outside a bookstore, await their owner.
Former warehouses, manicured with potted plants and glossy paint, have been transformed
into artists’ lofts, coffee shops, clothing stores and apartments. Carved into the
brickwork on one such building is a reminder of its commercial heyday: “Mercantile
Exchange 1872–1884.” Standing on what was once the loading dock, I can see five
nameplates, each with a little round button to the right. The rectangle at the very top
unceremoniously frames the name “Albee,” as it has for about half a century. In
that time, its occupant has traveled on and off (and off-off) Broadway — and all
points in between. Despite creating
fairly recognizable characters, and motives for them, Edward Albee was associated early on
with the absurdist wing of America’s avant-garde theater. His initial contributions
to that movement were one-acts such as The Sandbox (1960), Zoo Story (1960) and The
American Dream (1961). Albee was fleetingly embraced by arbiters of commercial taste with
his Broadway premiere, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and nabbed a Pulitzer
Prize (the first of three) for A Delicate Balance (1966). It was about this time that
“reality” in his plays grew increasingly ambiguous, his prose strategically more
obtuse, in conjunction with his attraction to elliptical dramatic structures. Everything
in The Garden Box (1967), Quotations From Chairman Mao (1968) and All Over (1971)
demonstrates Albee’s skin-dive from the comparative shallows of marital discord in
Virginia Woolf into the tangled depths of linguistic abstraction and symbolism. Seascape
(1975), for which Albee received his second Pulitzer, features two characters that are
large creatures from the sea boasting lizardlike features. “Mr. Albee
is still working in an ornately convoluted ‘literary’ style that has no
conversational feel to it,” Walter Kerr complained in The New York Times about Albee’s
The Lady From Dubuque in 1980. “By the time we get the syntax unraveled, the play has
moved on to new difficulties.” Kerr never stopped complaining about Albee’s
detachment and artifice until Frank Rich pounded that gavel with even more fervor after
Kerr’s retirement. By the mid-1980s,
none of Albee’s other plays had achieved the critical success of Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, and most stage pundits were chalking him off as a has-been. Yet he kept
writing, working, unperturbed, in American universities and European theaters. Well, maybe
he was a little perturbed, until 1994, when Three Tall Women, based on his adoptive
mother, received a third Pulitzer and Time magazine proclaimed, “Albee is back!” This month, in
which he turns 74, Albee is back once again with three plays — one old and two new
— arriving in the New York region simultaneously: The McCarter Theater in Princeton,
New Jersey, is hosting a revival of All Over with Rosemary Harris, Michael Learned and
Myra Carter that is rumored to be NYC-bound. Meanwhile, off-Broadway at the Signature
Theater: Peter Norton Space, Anne Bancroft — as soon as she recovers from pneumonia
— stars as sculptor Louise Nevelson in Albee’s new biographical play, Occupant.
And finally, most remarkable in an era when even Neil Simon can’t land a Broadway
opening, Albee’s much-anticipated new play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, opens this
week on Broadway at the John Golden Theater, with Mercedes Ruehl and Bill Pullman. Standing on the
loading dock at 9:59 a.m., with all this and the playwright’s reputation as a
formidable interview subject in mind, I press the buzzer a couple of times and wait.
Nothing. Then I notice a bespectacled man in an overcoat, with a shock of silver hair and
a mustache, and a newspaper under his arm, striding toward an elevator door on the other
side of the dock. On seeing me approach, Albee extends his hand for a firm grasp. At the fifth
floor, the elevator opens directly into Albee’s cavernous two-tiered loft. The main
room is a broad expanse of polished hardwood floor, raw brick walls, and, all the way at
the far end, a kitchen and a spiral staircase. When Albee slips into the kitchen to get
some coffee, I wander through a small forest of primitive-looking sculptures (including
the work of his friend Nevelson) and abstract paintings. Sunshine pours in from above,
warming the interior brick. Albee, now wearing a leather jacket and a hearing aid, returns
from the kitchen, his shoes squeaking. We settle around a glass table. He speaks gently,
softly, but with a twinkle in his eye, and occasionally he holds out a crooked finger to
accentuate a point. L.A. WEEKLY: In
the late ’70s, you came to UCLA and spoke to a graduate seminar I was in. I remember
asking you then whether you felt language had any capacity to actually convey ideas, and
you said no. EDWARD ALBEE: I
was probably talking about the fact that people hear only what they want to hear. And now, almost 25 years later, how would you
answer the same question? I’d say that
people hear only what they want to hear. [He smiles.] I do feel that in a serious play,
people should be prepared to listen. Plays do come at you more through the ear than the
eye. Movies come at you through the eye. A play is 90 percent an auditory experience. I
don’t trust people to pay the attention they should, to listen to language in drama.
So my lack of confidence then and now has to do with people’s reaction to their
responsibility to language. Then there’s the issue of the reduced attention span.
People used to be able to listen to and comprehend an entire paragraph at a time. In 1962, the week
before Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened, you wrote a commentary in The New York
Times about the difference between Broadway and off-Broadway, how friends were
congratulating you for finally making it to Broadway — as though years of work
off-Broadway had been merely an apprenticeship or even an indulgence — and about how
value on Broadway is equated with money, a complaint that today seems ever so familiar. Has anything changed? The value system
then was all crap, and still is today; it just manifests itself differently. In an ideal
world, Beckett and Chekhov would be much more popular than they are, and the theater would
be properly funded. The only thing that has changed, unfortunately, is that commerce owns
theater much more than it used to. The costs are preposterous, it makes cowards out of
producers. When we did Virginia Woolf in 1962, our total cost to open the production was
$42,000. Off-Broadway, we produced Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with my Zoo Story
for $3,000. It just means that as the ticket prices go up, it drives the audiences that
you want out of the theater. And you can’t just turn your back and write for movies,
because there you have no control of your work, and no protection from them simply
dismissing you from it and hiring somebody else to take it over. But isn’t
the theater, even off-Broadway and in the regions, adopting much the same philosophy
— with committees and dramaturges “developing” new theater works to their
satisfaction? The Dramatists
Guild contract protects us. Not a word of the play can be changed without the playwright’s
consent. Yes, but you know
the subtle, real-life pressures that accrue. The fear of being “difficult”
combined with the desire to keep working in a particular theater, or one in its network. You have to stand
up for yourself from the very beginning of your career. The playwright doesn’t have
to make changes, and the playwright would be wise not to. I never went into the theater to
be an employee. If you refuse to be owned and refuse to be an employee, they’ll
probably start to revile you. You’ll know what’s going on, and you have to laugh
a little. You can’t get hurt and enraged by it, because that cripples you. And of
course that makes them angrier and angrier, because they can’t cripple you, which is
even more amusing. Sometimes the laughter is in the dark. You’re
speaking from personal experience? From your relationship with the critics? [Albee does not
respond.] For well over 15
years, Walter Kerr kept complaining that you weren’t present in your plays, too
distant . . . Yes, it’s
easy to talk about poor Walter; he’s dead now and I’m not. Walter Kerr couldn’t
even figure out in Virginia Woolf how two enormously intelligent and sensitive people can
play games. (I once told him that Irish Rose is a better play than King Lear, and he
stopped talking to me for a month.) But Walter had another problem, he had a problem with
any play that went beyond the fourth wall ...And I don’t write about me to begin
with. I write about my characters. Who was the one who now writes columns but used to be
the theater critic? His columns are much better than his drama criticism, by the way . . .
[It’s hard to discern whether Albee is being playfully forgetful, or simply doesn’t
wish to say the name Frank Rich in his home.] He had his enemies list. I never got a fair
shake from the guy. I remember once he introduced me at a benefit reading we were doing;
he was so effusive, his praise of my career, I got up and turned to him and said, “Thank
you for the lovely words, but where were you when I needed you?” Sometimes I think
the critics have a pack mentality, as though they have drinks and decide what they are
going to write. None of them liked The Man Who Had Three Arms, because it’s about
them — a man who grows a third arm and becomes enormously famous. And then the arm
goes away and his career vanishes. It’s about the arbitrary creation. They, of
course, decided that I was writing about myself, even though my talent had not gone away. I was going to ask you — no, it’s a
foolish question. Did I ever doubt
myself? [He smiles.] If you don’t have a rod of steel in your spine, you’re
never going to survive in the arts in this country. If you were 20
again, knowing what you know now, would you go into the theater? I tell my
students, “If you can find anything else in your life that will make you happy, do
it. Because in the theater, virtue is not its own reward. But if you’ll be unhappy if
you’re not in the theater, if you like swimming in polluted water with sharks, come
on in.” You grew up as
the only son of adoptive parents, and a particularly assertive mother. In Three Tall
Women, for which the critics welcomed you back into the fold, a rather difficult young man
appears in Act 2 at the bed of his particularly assertive mother. In Occupant, the
character of Louise Nevelson speaks at length about her rather difficult son — not
the same situation literally, but there are parallels . . . [Quizzically]
Really? In The Goat, a
very strained episode of marital discord is punctuated throughout by the appearance of the
couple’s troubled gay son. I’ve never
written autobiography. Three Tall Women was based on my adoptive mother, but I had the
oddest sensation through the writing process that I was inventing the character. A friend
told me I had been much too kind to her. Is it possible
you write plays to purge yourself of troubling emotions? I don’t
know. I write plays to find out why I’m writing them. And now you have
a play on Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway running at the same time. That’s
truly remarkable. Yes, it is. I just want to
say, almost a quarter of a century after that seminar at UCLA, how privileged I feel to be
here, in this situation. [Albee smiles, and strokes his mustache.] As well you should. |