“I was desperate,” he recalls with no pleasure. Then, a few weeks before he turned 30, A!bee did write something. The income allowed him to slop through a comfortably shabby existence in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, as one of the late-rising legion of tennis-shoed young men who were, someday, going to write something. Less than six years ago, however, the only thing impressive about Edward Albee was that a grandmother had left him $100,000 in trust. So impressive, in fact, that although he is supposed to be a ferocious critic of the American society, State Department Chautauqua officials recently booked him into Russia under the cultural exchange program. There is no denying that the credentials he has presented both on and off Broadway are impressive. He is 35 but looks 26, and his face is the kind you see waiting in an ad agency, 15 minutes early for an appointment with the assistant head of personnel.īut Albee, bad type-casting or not, can look, on a good night, very much like the New Thundering Savior of the American stage. The young man, who was Edward Albee, author of the stage version of Ballad, did not look as if he could possibly have attended enough opening-night parties to have become bored. “This” was the roomful of 32-toothed smilers waiting to widen their smiles or narrow them to smirks, depending on the reviews. “Why do we have to put up with this?” he asked, in a voice edged with boredom and irritation.
#Symbols in the sandbox by edward albee tv#
After Ballad ’ s opening performance, the first man interviewed by TV reporters was crying.Īn hour or so after that opening, a thin young man at the cast party turned to Colleen Dewhurst, the show’s star. The audience has had its emotions wrung out by something it does not understand and does not like, but cannot dismiss. The cast takes its bows, and the cash customers walk up the aisle wearing a look that Broadway has come to know well. The man recovers, clubs the woman to the ground, then gouges out her eyes. She has nearly strangled the man, when the dwarf shrieks and jumps on her back. Then the woman’s greater strength begins to tell. Their fight is brutal, and for a time it is even. When the woman and the man have finished readying themselves, they face each other, crouch, and spring. A lame dwarf lurches from one to the other like an evil Cupid, insane with glee. The big woman greases her arms with hog fat. Broadway’s Hottest Playwright, Edward Albee