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Theater 31.1 (2001) 136-138



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Books

The Zoo Story and the Whole Story

Jonathan Shandell


Edward Albee: a Singular Journey. By Mel Gussow. 1999: Simon and Schuster

IMAGE LINK=Edward Albee will often avoid the subject of his own childhood by joking that he was "born at thirty." That was the year he gave birth to The Zoo Story and thus came of age as a mature, innovative playwright. Now, forty-two years later, Mel Gussow finally explores the totality of Albee's life, beginning with those first three decades. A Singular Journey is the first complete biography of a playwright whose childhood casts a larger shadow on his drama than most critics and audiences might realize, or than Albee himself will admit.

Albee's recent national resurgence, cresting with his 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women, follows more than a decade of poor critical reception and self-imposed exile from New York production. While Albee's references to himself in previous works had been [End Page 136] cryptic and indirect, Three Tall Women directly dramatizes the playwright's troubled relationship with his adoptive mother, thus opening a portal into Albee's deeply troubled family history. Gussow's biography, begun in 1994, follows in the thematic footsteps of Three Tall Women; Albee's relationship with his mother consistently finds its way into the narrative, providing a through-line for Gussow's discussion of Albee as a public artist and a private individual.

But now that the long-closed door to Albee's past has started to swing open, how far should we push it? What do we truly need to know about Albee's unhappy childhood, his bohemian life in Greenwich Village, and his rises and falls into and out of mainstream theatrical favor? Gussow unearths much that is useful. Accounts of Albee's early troubles--his distant relationship with both adoptive parents, his dropping out of private schools and universities, his denial and concealment of homosexuality--establish clear connections with stage characters he would later create, especially within the posh but alienating suburban setting of A Delicate Balance. Recounting Albee's life in New York City, the book vividly demonstrates how the random encounters with strangers the writer repeatedly faced as a Western Union courier fed directly into the absurdism of The Zoo Story.

Gussow also revisits formative encounters between the young Albee and two elder statesmen of the American stage: Thornton Wilder and William Inge. A conversation with Wilder helped turn a floundering, confused young writer into a dramatist; after reading some of the twenty-five-year-old Albee's poetry, "suddenly [Wilder] asked Albee, 'Have you ever thought about writing plays?'" As one might expect, "The effect was inspirational," perhaps the incipient moment of a fruitful theatrical life. The meeting with Inge was less encouraging, but also significant. When Inge gave polite but discouraging criticism of The Zoo Story and sent Albee away from his posh Sutton Place apartment in 1958, Albee responded by writing Fam and Yam, "a malicious spoof of a meeting between a famous American playwright (like Inge) and a young American playwright (like Albee)." Success like Inge's awaited Albee in the future.

When discussing influences, Gussow (to his credit) does not confine himself to the well-trodden path leading back to Beckett and Ionesco. He also draws convincing parallels to James Thurber, suggesting that Albee's dialogue (particularly in Virginia Woolf) mirrors "the comic realist" of Thurber's short stories: "Albee and Thurber share a comic sensibility and an understanding of the difficulty of trying to maintain an equilibrium on the marital tightrope, of the secrets that bind couples together and also tear them apart." Still, Gussow rightly elevates Albee's writing to a higher poetic plane, claiming that "Albee is . . . the more probing artist. Thurber cartoons instill the dialogue of Albee's plays, but with Albee there are currents beneath the captions."

A Singular Journey charts these currents in detail and with nuance, but too often Gussow [End Page 137] does not seem to know when to stop. The biographer often fails to filter extraneous...

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