, 1961
1959–1966: The Early Plays Albee moved into New York's
Greenwich Village, His roommate in New York was the composer
William Flanagan. Primarily in his early plays, Albee's work had various characters that challenged the image of a heterosexual marriage. Despite challenging society's views about the gay community, he did not view himself as an LGBT advocate. was first staged in
Berlin in 1959 before premiering Off-Broadway in 1960. His next,
The Death of Bessie Smith, similarly premiered in Berlin before arriving in New York. Albee's most iconic play, ''
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'', opened on Broadway at the
Billy Rose Theatre on October 13, 1962, and closed on May 16, 1964, after five previews and 664 performances. The opening night cast featured
Uta Hagen,
Arthur Hill,
George Grizzard and
Melinda Dillon. The play won the
Tony Award for Best Play in 1963 and was selected for the
1963 Pulitzer Prize by the award's drama jury, but the selection was overruled by the advisory committee, which elected not to give a drama award at all. The two members of the jury,
John Mason Brown and
John Gassner, subsequently resigned in protest. An
Academy Award-winning
film adaptation by
Ernest Lehman was released in 1966 starring
Elizabeth Taylor,
Richard Burton,
George Segal, and
Sandy Dennis, and was directed by
Mike Nichols. In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
1971–1987: The Middle Plays (
The New York Times, 1966), inspired by a photograph taken in 1962 from
Bettmann/
Corbis. In 1971 he wrote
All Over, a two-act play originally titled
Death, the second half of a projected double bill with another play called
Life (which later became
Seascape). The play premiered on
Broadway at the
Martin Beck Theatre with
John Gielgud directing and starred
Jessica Tandy,
Madeleine Sherwood, and
Colleen Dewhurst.
The New York Times writer
Clive Barnes wrote, "It is a lovely, poignant and deeply felt play. In no way at all is it an easy play -- this formal minuet of death, this symphony ironically celebrating death's dominion. It is not easy in its structure, a series of almost operatic arias demanding, in their precision, pin-point concentration from the audience, and it is certainly not easy in its subject matter." In 1974 he wrote
Seascape, which won the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It debuted on Broadway with
Deborah Kerr and
Frank Langella. It was nominated for the
Tony Award for Best Play losing to
Peter Shaffer's
Equus. Clive Barnes of
The New York Times declared the play "a major event", adding, "As Mr. Albee has matured as a playwright, his work has become leaner, sparer and simpler. He depends on strong theatrical strokes to attract the attention of the audience, but the tone of the writing is always thoughtful, even careful, even philosophic." He compared his work alongside
Samuel Beckett and
Harold Pinter. Albee continued to write plays including
Listening (1976),
Counting the Ways (1976) before a brief break before
The Lady from Dubuque (1980) which had a short run on Broadway. He wrote the three act play
The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983) which was received negatively with
Frank Rich of
The New York Times writing, "isn't a play - it's a temper tantrum in two acts... One of the more shocking lapses of Mr. Albee's writing is that he makes almost no attempt even to pretend that Himself is anything other than a maudlin stand-in for himself, with the disappearing arm representing an atrophied talent." Albee's plays during the 1980s received mixed reviews with Michael Billington of
The Guardian writing, "American dramatists invariably end up as victims of their own myth: in a success-crazed culture they are never forgiven for failing to live up to their own early masterpieces. But if Edward Albee has suffered the same cruel fate as
Arthur Miller and
Tennessee Williams, he has kept on trucking". Billington wrote of Albee's 1987 play,
Marriage Play, "At the end the play achieves a metaphorical resonance by suggesting that marriage is an accumulation of meaningless habits and that "nothing has made any difference". The 2018 production received the
Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Allison Adato of
Entertainment Weekly wrote of the play, "Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, in which a nonagenarian revisits events of her life refracted through both her own dementia and the differing recollections of her younger selves, is a not-quite-memory play filled with regret, resentment, entitlement, various bodily indignities".
Georgia State University English professor Matthew Roudane divides Albee's plays into three periods: the Early Plays (1959–1966), characterized by gladiatorial confrontations, bloodied action and fight to the metaphorical death; the Middle Plays (1971–1987), when Albee lost the favor of Broadway audience and started premiering in the U.S. regional theaters and in Europe; and the Later Plays (1991–2016), received as a remarkable comeback and watched by appreciative audiences and critics the world over. According to
The New York Times, Albee was "widely considered to be the foremost American playwright of his generation." The less-than-diligent student later dedicated much of his time to promoting American university theatre. He served as a Distinguished Professor of Playwriting and held the Lyndall Finley Wortham Chair in the Performing Arts at the
University of Houston. His plays are published by
Dramatists Play Service and
Samuel French, Inc. ==Philanthropy==