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THEPLAYWRIGHTANDTHELADY FROM DUBUQUE: RABE BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ALBEE INTERVIEWS Sheila Rabi/lard Philip C. Kolin, ed. ConversationswithEdward Albee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,1988. xxix + 223pp. Philip C. Kolin. David Rabe:A StageHistoryand a Primaryand Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1988. xii + 273 pp. It is difficult to determine the readership for whom Conversations with Edward Albee is intended. The reviewer who digests the book as a whole and absorbs the inevitable repetitions of twenty-seven different interviewers is far from an ideal audience. Yet if one dips into the collection casually,looking for the illuminating biographical detail or even an entertaining bit of gossip, it offers merely the mildest diversion. Despite the fact that critics have attempted to link Albee's dramas with both the difficult marriage of his adoptive parents and the playwright's homosexuality, there are only oblique references to Albee's personal life. On the other hand, Kolin seems to overstate the case for scholarly edification when he assures the reader that the very repetitiveness of the collection will provide material for useful comparisons. He himself admits that Albee resists discussion of stylistic development in his plays-- "I've written five plays; each of them is in a different style" (Diehl interview), consistently describes much of the work of composition as an unconscious process that cannot be investigated too carefully, lest it "evaporate" (Flanagan interview), and displays considerable scepticism about the worth of the conversations here recorded: "It's not that I mind being interviewed. I think it's really a waste of time" (Smith interview). Yet this chronological selection of extemporaneous talk from 1961 through 1986 remains curiously instructive. The reader observes Albee's development of a public persona, his attempts to discover a place for the playwright in American society, and, indirectly, can gain a view of Albee's audience and feel the urgent pressure of a certain milieu upon a man of the theatre. 262 Sheila Rabillard What impresses is not so much Albee's repeated pronouncements on the state of American theatre, American culture and human society, as the need of each interviewer to propose, and Albee to confront, such topics. Once Albee outgrows his early tendency to take refuge in flippancy, he begins to define and thus defend his career in terms of work, social utility and moral education. Albee presents himself as an indefatigable worker in and for the theatre: not only playwright but producer, director, patron and sponsor of younger writers, advocate of contracts giving dramatists artistic control of their work, conscientious lecturer and educator who uses the interview itself to teach audiences to approach plays independent of the drama critics. He is quick to defend himself against charges of elitism and what he calls "hermeticism," insisting that the audience should simply open itself to the experience of the play; at one particularly democratic moment, he responds quite seriously to a television interviewer who asks whether his dramas are "a little bit obtuse [sic]"and thus appealing to an "inner circle." Over all of these interviews the Lady from Dubuque (Harold Ross's rather than Edward Albee's) casts a long shadow. To her--middle-class, middle-brow, and imbued with firm notions of work, worth and success-Albee defends his art: "the most valuable function of theatre ... is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theatre is determined by how much we want to know about that" (Wolf interview). It is remarkable how consistently Albee defines his drama in terms of use rather than pleasure. By the end of the volume one wonders if there is not more than a trace of this asceticism even in his angry-young-man outbursts against the crass commercial entertainments of Broadway. Surely there is a peculiarly American puritanism at work here, both in Albee and in his implied audience. Keeping these limitations in mind, there are several of the conversations that the scholar or admirer of Albee will be grateful to have in readily accessible form. Albee seems to be genuinely engaged by the questions that Adrienne Clarkson and Kathy Sullivan ask. William Flanagan, a friend and collaborator, and Terence McNally, once a protege of Albee's Playwrights...

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