Albee’s 25 plays form a body of work that is recognized as unique, uncompromising, controversial and provocative. A canon that is, as Albee himself describes it “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” His 1991 drama,
Three Tall Women, enjoyed a stunning, sold-out success in New York and has been staged across the country and around the world. Its depiction of“everywoman” at three different stages of her life received Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle and earned Albee his third Pulitzer Prize, an honor that is bested only by Eugene O’Neill’s four awards.

Born in Washington, DC, Albee was adopted as an infant by Reid Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee of the powerful Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. Albee left home when he was 20 and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. He took a variety of menial jobs until 1959 when The Zoo Story made him a famous playwright, first in Europe, where it premiered in Berlin, and then in New York. This short work, in which a bum entices an executive to commit murder, together with 1962’s full-length Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a brutal portrait
of a hard-drinking academic couple, and 1966’s A Delicate Balance, his first Pulitzer Prize-winner, created the mold for American drama for the rest of the 20th century. In 1975, Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize with Seascape, which combined theatrical experiment and social commentary in a story about a retired vacationing couple who meet a pair of sea lizards at the beach. Albee’s latest play is The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, an unlikely story of love, respect and family. The Goat was awarded the 2002 Tony Award for Best Play.

In spite of the wide range in styles and subject matter, Albee has said that all his plays “confront being alive and how to behave with the awareness of death. Every one of my plays is an act of optimism, because I make the assumption that it is possible to communicate with other people. The people who think Virginia Woolf was a love story are a lot closer to the truth than those who think it was a tragedy. At least there was communication in that marriage.” And like George and Martha, whose long night’s journey finally ends in day, Albee and his public have communicated with each other ever since they met--through periods of love and exhilaration, anger and neglect, truce and reconciliation.