Edward Albee: A Casebook (review)

Edward Albee criticism follows closely the chronology of the playwright's professional ups and downs over the past forty-five years. The first period dates from the early 1960s to around 1983 and the disastrous reception of The Man Who Had Three Arms; the second starts in the wake of Albee's triumphal return to New York in 1994 with Three Tall Women and shows no signs of abating. Bruce Mann's Casebook, covering plays through 2001, is, I believe, the first collection of essays on Albee's theatre published after this second coming. It is a slim book: ten essays, a chronology, and an interview with the playwright contained within 168 pages. In the case of a few contributions (Emily Rosenbaum's seven-page discussion of All Over and Ronald Rapine's eight-page study of The Lady from Dubuque), their brevity makes it impossible for the writers to go beyond a cursory outline of an argument. So, too, the underdeveloped but promising discussion by Lisa Siefker Bailey, who uses Richard Slotkin's theory of regeneration through violence in American society as the basis of a cultural critique of The Zoo Story, removes the play from the absurdity box into which first-generation Albee critics tended to place it. In Norma Jenckes's "Postmodernist Tensions in Albee's Recent Plays," which analyzes Marriage Play, Fragments, and Three Tall Women, the length is less an obstacle than the vague use of terms such as modernist, high modernist, and postmodernist, and Jenckes's shifting position on which category to place Albee into and why. This said, the book as a whole does offer some interesting new readings of familiar Albee successes and several generally neglected plays; and while it does not break much new critical ground, it suggests that the field is again open for play.

Mann's introductory essay begins appropriately with Three Tall Women, which he reads biographically, arguing that the play "brought new life to Albee," an "internal, self renewal" (14), marked by the overcoming of "his mirror stage crisis" and acceptance of the inevitability of death, both personal experiences encoded in the play. While Mann may be correct, such blanket assertions and conflations of writer and work are off-putting, implying an insider's knowledge of the motivations not of character but of creator. He is more successful in his placement of the play alongside O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Williams's Something Cloudy, Something Clear, also autobiographical dramas in which an aging playwright looks back to his sources of inspiration.

Anne Paolucci, one of the most perceptive and consistent of Albee critics over the years, in "A Retrospective (and Beyond)" offers a summary of early critical and audience reactions to Albee's works, revisiting her own well-known comparative studies between Albee's plays and those of Pirandello, particularly Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each in his Own Way, and Tonight We Improvise. She also uses Pirandellian parallels to segue into a long and illuminating discussion of The Man Who Had Three Arms, teasing out its paradoxes, humor, pathos, and characterizations. Rather than being Albee at his obscurantist worst, the play, Paolucci argues, is as accessible to audiences as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and in fact resembles it.

Two other innovative readings of Albee plays that attempt to revisit and revision earlier theories and readings are Lincoln Konkle's "'Good, Better, Best, Bested': The Failure of American Typology in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and Robert F. Gross's "Like Father, Like Son: The Ciphermale in A Delicate Balance and Malcolm." Konkle, drawing on theories of typology put forth by Americanists Sacvan Bercovitch and Emory Elliott, argues that George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not a passive, reactive husband, as usually described, but rather "the jeremiad voice" of a "type of father of the nation" (51), whose function it is to inspire the next generation—Nick and Honey—themselves types representing the failures of...