Saturday, October 06, 2012

How Edward Albee is Still Redefining Himself


It's been 50 years since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Vulture profiles the playwright, here.

From the piece...

During our conversation, he hands down several tabletsful of similarly exacting commandments, about playwriting and life. Never work on anything you’re not enjoying; “otherwise it’s just typing.” Never criticize what you’re writing while you’re writing it. Live in the reality of what’s happening, not in your interpretation of it. Every time you write a play, write the first play anybody’s ever written. Don’t strategize your feelings; just feel. Don’t write to solve your problems; you won’t.

The aim seems to be to plant his flag in an eternal present in which there is no expectation and no second-guessing. Still, he has often violated his proscription against revising old plays. In 2004, the one-act Zoo Story got sutured to a new one-act called Homelife to form an entity now known officially (and tellingly) as Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo. And most major productions of Virginia Woolf — his first full-length work and still his most famous—have endured his fiddling. For the 2005 version, he omitted several pages at the end of Act Two that he thought were overwritten. The current revival, starring Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, may well see the benefit of even further compression. “I don’t want to bore me or anyone else,” he says. Which is why the revisions, he insists, “are always cutting.”

“Always cutting” might well be his watch cry, if not yet his epitaph.

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