BOOKS
341
The Life of a Playwright
EDWARD ALBEE: A SINGULAR JOURNEY. By Mel Gussow. Simon
&
Schus–
ter. $3°.00.
AT THE CHRISTLIKE AGE OF THIRTY, Edward Albee emerged from obscu–
rity as the savior of American theater by penning his one-act play
The
Zoo
Story.
Unprecedented notoriety followed the success of
Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in 1962. Still in his mid-thirties, Albee was
crucified by the New York critics over his second original full-length
play,
Tiny Alice.
The playwright's reputation languished for three
decades, but unlike Eugene O'Neill, whose final triumph was posthu–
mous, or Tennessee Williams, who lost and never regained his footing
as an artist, Albee witnessed his own Second Coming in 1994, heralded
by the laudatory critical reception to
Three Tall Women.
Mel Gussow, longtime theater critic for
The New York Times,
emphasizes the ultimately ascendant arc of this playwright's career
throughout
Edward Albee: A Singular Journey.
This is a friendly biog–
raphy-Gussow has followed Albee's career and socialized with the
playwright since the early 1960s. By focusing on Albee's ultimate reju–
venation, Gussow justifies the polite, even protective stance he takes
toward Albee's entire
oeuvre,
which for a time comprised a string of
critically drubbed Broadway failures:
All Over, Seascape, The Lady
from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms.
Of Albee's return to
critical glory, Gussow writes, "Suddenly, people who had disparaged
him in the last decade or more, who thought he was bankrupt as a play–
wright, were surrounding him with adulation." The implication is that
the years of public neglect and critical disfavor were unwarranted, yet
without the success of
Three Tall Women
it would have been exceed–
ingly difficult to make that claim.
Gussow acknowledges the elements of Christian allegory in the
playwright's biography, noting repeatedly that Albee was greatly dis–
turbed as a young child upon first hearing the crucifixion story. The
self-willed martyrdom of Jesus Christ long fascinated if not obsessed
him, Gussow notes. This manifested itself in the young Albee's refusal
to engage in his studies at Lawrenceville Academy, from which he was
expelled, and later at Trinity College, which he was also asked to
leave. These rebellions irritated his wealthy adoptive parents and cul–
minated in a complete break with his family at age twenty. The deci–
sion to part was Albee's, yet he traces in it echoes of an earlier
