The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee (review)

When Edward Albee's plays first broke upon the American national consciousness in the 1960s, they were greeted with a hyperbolic recognition of their uniqueness and of Albee's artistic genius. Immediately, critics rushed to publish scores of studies to explain this new prodigy of the American theatre and heir apparent to O'Neill. Now, more than forty years later, the playwright has not faltered, and the work still provokes and amazes audiences, but the flow of scholarship is uneven and spasmodic. Yet, in the past decade, Albee has reclaimed his position as the dominant force on the American stage and has seen new plays win yet another Pulitzer and coveted international awards. So this collection of essays is overdue and welcome. The valuable Cambridge Companion series has delivered an extremely varied and provocative volume of essays from distinguished Albee scholars. Thoughtful editing by Stephen Bottoms has allowed the shape of the playwright's career to emerge more clearly and the once gleefully noted "critical failures" in Albee's body of work have been recuperated with great ingenuity and perspicacity. Having written an introduction that is a model of clarity, Bottoms's own contribution on Albee's adaptations supplies a singularly even and original reading of those plays that have often been castigated or neglected. Since the plays are discussed in rough chronological order, the first two essayists face the challenge of saying something new about the earliest and most familiar works. However, Philip Kolin finds a way to add something about The Zoo Story when he stresses the play's connections to Beat culture. He also makes strong claims for the overlooked play The Death of Bessie Smith. Matthew Roudane, in the second essay, defends his thesis that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is Albee's most affirmative play and also makes valuable connections between Albee and the work of Antonin Artaud. Entering the more contested realm of Albee's portrayal of sexuality, John M. Clum speculates that it is Albee's seeming inability "to read his own sexual desires and experiences into his heterosexual characters, which creates a nonerotic coolness"(59). Clum's provocative essay gives powerful evidence for a paradoxical thesis that Albee's plays are surprisingly chaste and are more about lack and loss of desire than about sex. He also offers a different reading of the perennial problem play, Tiny Alice, which he treats as another version of the Albee marriage play, and poses some probing questions about Julian's age that might set some director thinking of an unconventional casting for the play. Thomas P. Adler looks at the Pulitzer-prize-winning plays and demonstrates the wealth of Albee's range and his constant reinvention through "beginning again." Brenda Murphy treats as "threnodies" or plays of lamentation for the dead four plays (Box-Mao-Box, All Over, The Lady from Dubuque, and Three Tall Women) that, grouped together, illuminate each other. The little performed or discussed Box-Mao-Box benefits most from this grouping. Gerry McCarthy contributes an insightful essay that reminds us of the ways that audiences make plays' meanings. His perspective enables him to make exciting connections among Chekhov, Beckett, and Albee, especially in the dramatic presentation of "premature grief," which he defines as "a human capacity to feel loss before its onset" (120).

One of the rewards of reading this collection is discovering essays that provide a new lens through which to view Albee's work. Focusing on the post-1980s work, Christopher Bigsby's contribution moves through Albee's most recent plays. He concludes a valuable discussion of Occupant, Albee's depiction of the creative life of the artist Louise Nevelson, with one of his masterful summations: "[Albee] is prepared to settle for 'a little bit of light' generated by an acknowledgment of the truth of the human condition, an acceptance of pain as well as pleasure (this being part of the contract), and recognition that art is evidence...