Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Finding the Sun, At Home at the Zoo, and a host of other work. Not exactly pop star famous, but a rock star for a generation of playwrights.
You will be missed, sir.
I’ve lost track of how many roles I played in my (now defunct) theatrical career, but George in WAoVW was easily the most difficult. The theatre where we did it was a pretty close-knit group, so it was the usual practice for the cast to get together at least briefly after a performance; in this case, however, we found ourselves needing to go off separately to de-stress.
Not the most pleasant of storytellers, but he had a definite talent for peeling back the veneer and giving us a glimpse of the ugliness we all carry around inside. While confronting it is anything but comfortable, we ignore it at our peril.
Pax tecum, Mr Albee.
Albee was, along with Pinter, my favorite modern playwright. He wrote dozens of amazing plays, and astoundingly continued to write great and relevant works up until just a few years ago.
His style evolved over time, but he was always one of the greats.
I’m pretty sad about this actually.
The first professional play I ever directed was an Albee piece. I did my senior thesis project in school on Albee. His work was a big part of my life for a long time.
“Hey, Pinter, c’,mon. Godot’s buying.”
Once again I’m surprised to find someone was still alive when I hear about their death. Now truly impressed at how young he was at the time he wrote his most famous work.
Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of the few things I was forced to read in high school, and have voluntarily re-read more than once as an adult.
The idea that hate and love exist together, simultaneously and in the same person (well, all of us), to mold the ways we treat each other, is something he explored very well, and he deserves credit as a pioneer. Others followed him and built on his work. I don’t know if he had another great play in him, but if he did, someone will write it: he left a clear blueprint.
Well, it’s a damn hard thing to watch, too!! Very emotionally draining, even for the audience.
A group of us got together in grad school and put on his play A Zoo Story. It was an experience.
I understand he later wrote an extension of it, filling out the bios of the people involved, but I never read it.
We studied Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf in one of my undergrad classes.