Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth, and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life, died on Friday at his home in Montauk, New York. He was 88.
His personal assistant, Jakob Holder, confirmed the death. Holder said he had died after a short illness.
Albee’s career began after the death of Eugene O’Neill and after Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had produced most of their best-known plays. From them he inherited the torch of American drama, carrying it through the era of Tony Kushner and “Angels in America” and into the 21st century.
He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, The Zoo Story, opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.”
A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, The Zoo Story zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench.
When the play came to the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village the next year, it helped propel the burgeoning theatre movement that became known as off-Broadway.
In 1962, Albee’s Broadway debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a famously scabrous portrait of a withered marriage, won a Tony Award for best play. It ran for more than a year and half, and enthralled and shocked theatregoers with its depiction of stifling academia and of a couple whose relationship has been corroded by dashed hopes, wounding recriminations and drink.
The 1966 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, turned the play into Albee’s most famous work; it had, he wrote three decades later, “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort really nice but a trifle onerous.”
New York Times Service
