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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