The Playwright or Who Is Edward Albee?
Originally published at The Off-Center. Please leave any comments there.
So I’m sitting in theater history on Thursday, and we’re discussing Beckett and Albee, when all of a sudden there is a knock on the door. Probably just a late-comer, right? We’re only 20-minutes into the three-hour class, so that’s a fair assumption. But I didn’t notice the glimmer in my professor’s eye when she went to the door, though my jaw did drop along with everyone else in the class when in walked Edward Albee, arguably the greatest living American playwright. So we all chilled with Albee for the remaining two-and-a-half hours of class, and he talked about his work and we asked him questions and came to know his good-natured irreverence and that he didn’t hide the fact that he thought the writer was far and away the most important part of… anything ever. I, for one, very much enjoyed this attitude.
I took the best notes I could, though I spent a lot of time staring at him with wide-eyed admiration (Come on, Virginia Woolf and The Goat are two of my favorite plays of all time!) but I have typed up what I managed to get down on paper and am posting everything here for your enjoyment.
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“A draft? I don’t do drafts.”
“Theater is a collaboration with the self… When you write a play you write it alone. When someone wants to produce it, thats where the problems start.”
[to an actor] “Do whatever you want, so long as you end up where I intended… There is a difference between interpretation and distortion.”
“Perhaps a critic should have to read a play before he sees it. The criticism is based on the production, not the play.”
“The creative act is what the writer does.”
“I write plays because it’s the only kind of writing I do with any competence… The short story and I have different ideas about its nature, and the short story was usually right.”
[on directing] “I wrote the fucking thing [the zoo story], I wanted to direct it, and since I wrote it, they couldn’t stop me.”
-Punctuation: Learn by studying music to notate the rhythm of your plays. Learn choreography, sculpture, and painting.
-Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett - but don;t read only great plays, you’ll stop writing. Read rotten plays. They’re very encouraging.
“Some actors have trouble motivating ‘hello’.”
“You can’t teach anybody how to write. You can simply tell them how other people did it. No one can teach you how to write like you.”
“Most people start writing plays much too soon. Spend time with the characters, but try not to think too conceptually. Wait a while before writing it down.”
“[The movie of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] is in black and white, but I wrote the play in color.”
“The playwright is more important than the director.”
“Ibsen had no sense of humor.”
“Write the first play you’ve ever written, then write the first play that has ever been written.”
“Try to fail! If you only do what you know you can do, you’ll do less and less each time.”