Edward Albee: Conflict of Tradition

" ~1 'n',' EDWARD ALBEE: CONFLICT OF TRADITION IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS EXCELLENT COLLECTION American Play. wrights on Drama Horst Frenz remarks, axiomatically, that "O'Neill never founded a school." He is'right, of course, if one considers school to refer to the usual stylistic or structural elements of drama. In the Marlovian or Racinian sense O'Neill did not found a school. In the sense in which his work has become engrained in the American dra· matic tradition, however, he did. I do not mean the rather facile, nega· tive sense which Professor Frenz refers to' in the same sentence: "O'Neill never founded a school, and the constant experimenting and frequent change of style, which are so noticeable in his work, characterize the work of other American dramatists as well." Mere eclecticism of theatrical modes is not the cohering element of a school or a tradition. Nor has the American drama "sprung full-grown from the imagination of Eugene O'Neill" as it seems to Robert Brustein. Somewhere between these poles lies the meeting ground of O'Neill's talent and the cultural forces through which the drama in America developed into a reasonably coherent literary tradition. That this tradition has a strong affinity for psychological or psychiatric or psycho-analytic modes needs no particularly extended rehearsal. But, again, these modes are not what gives American dramatic literature its particular cohesive quality. The Freudian couch which hovers, Chagall-like, over the American drama, is not of itself a tradition, only a manifestation of it. Rather, the same forces which spread the psycho-analytic interest until it pervaded much of American intellectual life, also underlie the tradition. Perhaps unawares himself, Arthur Miller characterizes its source: If. • • by force of circumstance I came early and unawares to be fascinated by sheer process itself. How things connected. How the native personality of man was changed by his world, and the harder question, how he in turn could change the world." The key word is repeated in the passage: how. How to build a better mousetrap. How to fix our cities, our youth, our wars, our world, our inner and outer selves. The interest in psycho-analysis is therefore part of a,montage made up of, among other things, urban renewal, Dale Carnegie, prohibition , mass education, and what Theodore H. White. calls. theac274 1%7". CONFLICT IN ·ALBEE 275 tion~jn