LEGEND
EDWARD ALBEE
Of the man who once said, "If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly," what is there to add of any consequence? At 80, Albee remains one of the most vigorous playwrights in America and certainly the most distinguished. His three Pulitzer Prizes—for A Delicate Balance (1966), Seascape (1974), and Three Tall Women (1991)—reflect his tenacious grip on his own talent, as do his Tonys for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002). All display a searching, sober intellect but also a bravura instinct to pick apart the American Dream like a kid pulling the wings off a fly.His first play, The Zoo Story (1959), was denounced in the Senate as "filth" by none other than George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush—probably to the great discomfort of Albee's adoptive parents, who, he has joked, would have voted for Attila the Hun if he ran as a Republican. Although he knew he was gay from the age of 8 (his partner of 35 years, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died of cancer in 2005), Albee has long resisted attempts to see parables for gay experience in his plays, and he once halted an all-male version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by saying that if he'd wanted to write about two gay couples, he would have done so. Yet his plays often savagely critique bourgeois values, a reflection of his status as an outsider, the perennial enfant terrible. "Any play that doesn't offend somebody probably has something terribly wrong with it," he once said. "A lot of people should be offended, deserve to be offended. One shouldn't pull any punches. I'd rather be a disturber than a pacifier."
