Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays ed. by Julian N. Wasserman, Joy L. Linsley and Jerome A. Kramer, and: Edward Albee, Revised Edition by Richard E. Amacher (review)

Book Reviews 453 Sarl6s picks up his story once more he is left restating much of Chapter Two in Chapter Four, actually quoting from the same sources, citing different lines. However, once he does return to the straight historical line, Sarl6s is on far surer ground, and his book offers fine reading. One final problem remains for critics who will use Sarl6s's book in conjunction with Deutsch and Hanau's study. There are places where the two books diverge, where facts are contradictory. Since Sarl6s's is the later book, it would have been helpful if he had indicated these divergences and cited - as Louis Sheaffer does when working with O'Neill material - why his facts supersede others previously published. The discrepancies are not major - a picture of Louise Bryant's The Game with two sets of cast members; a difference of dates on which the first meeting of the Provincetown Players took place, Deutsch and Hanau citing September 4, 1916, and Sarl6s September 5. They do, however, prove annoying to a critic who would like to be accurate. Given these limitations, the book is still an important contribution to American theatre history, filling in details about the Provincetown experiment. Presumably for this reason, it was recently awarded the American Theatre Association's Barnard Hewitt Award for distinguished achievement in theatre history. LINDA BEN-ZVI, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY JULIAN N. WASSERMAN, JOY L. LINSLEY AND JEROME A. KRAMER, eds. Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays. Houston: University of St. Thomas 1983. Pp. xii, 158. $18; $10 (PB). RICHARD E. AMACHER. Edward Albee, Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne 1982. Pp. x, 219. $12·95· It is not surprising to find that one of the most interesting pieces in Julian N. Wasserman's collection is the interview with Edward Albee. What is interesting about it is not anything new (we are now all too familiar with Albee's ironies and veiled comments, the iconoclastic Olympian certainty about what theater should be, the graceful thrusts to remind us that any effort at finding "meaning" in plays is doomed to failure), but the exhilaration one always feels in reading a witty series of exchanges in which Albee - like the cat teasing the mouse - translates questions to his own liking and simply will not recognize the prerogatives of the critic. (Well, why not?) The interview, in fact, makes once again abundantly clear that Albee does not like to be classified with the critical labels we have developed for his work. As a critic-playwright (of sorts), I can understand an author's insistence that the work must speak for itself, at the same time sympathizing with the critic who must analyze or break down the integral whole in order for us to see the parts and perhaps in so doing come to a better grasp of the original. Still, one keeps hoping that some interviewer will find the right balance and approach Albee with his own language rather than the critical labels on 454 Book Reviews which we have learned to depend. I do not think that the interviewer really understood, for example, what Albee was getting at in this exchange: ALBEE ... These imprecisions ofthe theatre don't really help us all terribly much. It's the way theatre is done. I would rather that a person who knows how to read a play read a play of mine and see the performance in his head when he reads it than see a mediocre performance on stage. As opposed to many other people who feel that plays are complete only when they are performed, I am convinced that they are complete as a literary act which one can understand merely by reading. The performance is gravy, it seems to me: it's not the proof of the play. INTERVIEWER Artistotle maintains the same things. ALBEE Does he? The Interviewer goes on to explain. Does he really think that Albee does not know what Aristotle said on the subject? Would it not have been better to explore in what ways theater forces a single reading and has to miss all the undercurrents ofthe text? Or how a good actor can give us a reading (only one...