A line scrawled with soap on a mirror in a Greenwich Village bar became one of the most intriguing play titles of the 20th century: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? was a phrase perceived by the young Edward Albee through a glass dimly in the early 1950s and stored for later use. In the 10 years between leaving his adoptive parents' luxurious home and being "born" as a playwright at the age of 30, Albee spent many hours and nights in the company of the musicians, artists and writers who congregated in New York - silently watching, observing, absorbing, and drinking heavily.
While his first play, The Zoo Story (written in 1958 as a 30th birthday present to himself) was presented to the public and the press as a bolt from the blue, it had, in fact, many antecedents. As Mel Gussow, cultural critic with The New York Times describes in this rigorously researched biography, Albee had a long apprenticeship and had first started writing as a disaffected pupil at the succession of expensive schools he had been sent to.
"I've been to the zoo. I said I've been to the zoo. Mister, I've been to the ZOO!" From a casual encounter between two strangers on a park bench in Central Park, The Zoo Story develops into a raw confrontation, a cry of anguish and a ritualistic act of violence. With its taut, monologic structure, its threateningly controlled use of language and its expression of urban anomie, the play shook up the American theatrical scene, and when it was first produced by Richard Barr off-Broadway in 1960 with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, its impact was immense. Albee became a New York celebrity, linked by critics to the European avant garde, and hailed as a home-grown "Angry Young Man". A staple of the student theatre repertoire, the play influenced a generation and encouraged other talents, such as Tom Stoppard, to become playwrights. As John Guare puts it in Gussow's book: "Theatre for years became littered with park benches. To show you were avant garde, you needed no more than a dark room and a park bench."
Albee's unhappy and loveless family background gave him a particularly jaundiced view of the complacencies and pieties of the myth of the American family, which he went on to anatomise in The American Dream (1961), "long before the word dysfunctional was popularised", as Gussow puts it. But it was his excoriating portrait of a marriage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, his first full-length play, which revealed him to be an ebony-tinted observer of the ways in which people make each other unhappy in relationships. Through the course of a long, drunken evening passed by two couples in a university campus setting, it examines, as Albee himself said: "the destructive forces of various falsities in relationships, the self-deceptions. The play is about people . . . getting to the point where they can't any longer exist with a whole series of games, tricks and illusions and then knocking down the entire untenable superstructure." The older couple in the play, George and Martha, have created a fantasy child of 19, whom George eventually decides must be exorcised.
Many of Albee's acquaintances compared the vicious sparring between George and Martha with the verbal battles that he and his former lover and mentor, the composer William Flanagan, had very publicly engaged in. Albee resisted this interpretation and all other attempts to link the characters, or the play's bleak presentation of marriage, to his own homosexuality. In later years when directors wanted to stage the play with two male couples, Albee vetoed the proposals, arguing that this would make nonsense of many of the play's references, and that conflict in long-term relationships had little to do with sexual orientation.
With its brittle, alternately cruel and witty dialogue, its fearless honesty regarding lost illusions and the price of failure, which echoed Strindberg and, more specifically Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? established Albee as a major playwright, whose reputation swelled with Mike Nichol's riveting film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on top form.
It was many years before Albee produced any work approaching the level of Virginia Woolf, and while Gussow, who has known the playwright for decades, does his best to make a case for some of the adaptations (including The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Lolita and Malcolm), short plays and formal experiments of the intervening years, it is not until his recent work, Three Tall Women, that Albee has really returned to form.
Twenty years of very heavy drinking (and 10 years of unambiguous alcoholism, from 1967-77) reduced his ability to write anything sustained or fully realised, and while over those years he threw himself into encouraging young playwrights, teaching across the US and working with international writers' organisations such as PEN and the International Theatre Institute, for a writer this is no real substitute; it is `busy work'.
His heavily metaphorical religious play, Tiny Alice (1964) was dismissed as obscure and incomprehensible, a verdict which left Albee with a vigorous resentment of critics. He channelled some of his anger into a later play, The Man Who Had Three Arms, which centred on a character called Himself, who had enjoyed great success followed by failure and vilification. Not surprisingly, this humourless, aggressive work was interpreted by critics as autobiographical, to Albee's further infuriation.
In a thoroughly professional, workmanlike manner, Gussow documents these years, writing about the alcoholic excesses with understatement and a tactful avoidance of prurience, celebrating Albee's return to sobriety and to form in a play, Three Tall Women, which finally lays to rest the shadow of his adoptive mother, Frances, his "anti-muse". In 1994 this was a successful West End production with Maggie Smith, Frances de la Tour and Anastasia Hille.
While Gussow is clearly an authority on his subject and quotes extensively from many interviews and conversations with the author - invaluable sources for future critical studies, his narrative style is earnestly deadpan, unengaging and lacking in energy; he faithfully describes but somehow fails to evoke. Even the bubbling artistic circles of Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s refuse to come to life through his carefully calibrated lens.
His book exudes a sense of duty, of an exercise in setting the record straight, giving Albee his due and placing him in the great American pantheon with Eugene O'Neill, Tenessee Williams and Arthur Miller, while noting his influence over Sam Shephard and David Mamet. A labour of loyalty, perhaps, but not of love.