Albee in Performance, and: Edward Albee (The Later Plays) (review)

{ 131 } BOOK REV IEwS While it is clear that Dash enjoys and values musical theatre, the imbalance between her rather general knowledge of musical theatre history and form and her expert knowledge of Shakespeare undermines her overarching argument. That being said, much of the information presented in her five chapters on the process and mechanics of adaptation will be of interest to students, scholars, and theatre professionals. —TRACEY ElAINE CHESSuM University of Maryland, College Park \ Albee in Performance. By Rakesh H. Solomon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 296 pp. $24.95 paper. Edward Albee (The Later Plays). By Anne Paolucci. Middle Village, N.Y.: Griffon House, 2010. 165 pp. $20.00 paper. In the world of Albee scholarship, it is always exciting to welcome new studies exploring a subject who has himself continued to grow and change both in terms of his playwriting and in his directing—of both his own and others’ plays. These two volumes represent two traditions in Albee scholarship, the exploration of Albee as a working theatre artist and the study of Albee’s plays as literature. As an Albee scholar and director, and someone who has worked with Albee personally for over fifteen years (including watching him offer suggestions to actors on how to play The Zoo Story), I was completely absorbed by Rakesh Solomon’s detailed and nuanced exploration of Albee’s direction of his own work. The study is the culmination of over thirty years of documentation, starting in 1978, of Albee directing Albee, including countless hours of interviews with not only Albee but also several of his most famous and long-serving collaborators, including director Alan Schneider, actor Wyman Pendleton, and stage manager Mark Wright. Solomon documents Albee’s productions of his plays The American Dream, The Zoo Story, Box, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse­Tung, Fam & Yam, The Sandbox, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Mar­ riage Play, and Three Tall Women, giving a chapter to each production.The book eventually moves beyond Albee directing Albee, and the last chapter,“Albee and His Collaborators on Staging Albee,” is a collection of interviews with other directors who have directed Albee’s work. This chapter is filled with wonder- { 132 } BOOK REV IEwS ful details from some of Albee’s most recent productions, including Lawrence Sacharow’s Three Tall Women and David Esbjornson’s stagings of The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?, The Play about the Baby, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The revelations that come with Solomon’s documentation are quite stunning at times—including a jaw-dropping moment when Albee reveals that the Young Man in Albee’s absurdist farce The American Dream has actually come to kill Mommy and Daddy rather than to serve as a kind of cynical present from Grandma.The importance of Solomon’s work lies in the fact that it is clear from Albee’s directorial choices not only that many directors have misinterpreted his plays but also that major scholars may have significantly veered from authorial intention (at least as Albee himself would have it). Another surprise, at least for some readers, might be the extent to which Albee teases out the humor and comedy in his plays—even in scripts as apparently serious as The Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At the heart of what may be jarring to some who consider Albee’s work to be the quintessence of absurdism is Albee’s utterly naturalistic approach to directing his own plays and his insistence that actors play the characters as human beings.According to Solomon, this approach is tied to director Alan Schneider’s influence as a mentor for Albee’s directing—Schneider, a devotee of Lee Strasberg ’s acting technique, directed most if not all of the premieres of Albee’s plays from the 1960s through the 1980s. Solomon notes that during a production of The American Dream, a play that may be considered Albee’s most successful attempt to create an absurdist Ionesco-like farce, Albee instructs his actors to “see and believe in yourselves as actual, physical, realistic, naturalistic persons—not stylized characters” (40). Having worked with Albee myself on this play, I can...