Edward Albee (review)

Reviewed by: Edward Albee Thomas P. Adler Toby Zinman . Edward Albee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. 163, illustrated. $18.95 (Pb). Although not intended as such, Toby Zinman's engaging book might almost be seen as a companion to the recently published three-volume Collected Plays of Edward Albee, whose appearance she mentions in her introduction. Arranged chronologically, the book's brief essays (anywhere from four to fourteen pages long) introduce theatregoers and readers to each of Albee's original, though not his four adapted, works from The Zoo Story (1958) through Occupant (2008). As befits a series of books on modern dramatists that Michigan intends to be "concise" and "accessible," Zinman's approach is informal and even chatty. Surprising, however, for a university press book is the virtual absence of any reference to or acknowledgement of the previous academic scholarship about Albee's plays. [End Page 254] Zinman's method is appropriately suggestive rather than prescriptive, eschewing what she calls "hermetically sealed interpretations" and offering instead strategies or possibilities to help audiences generate "their own understandings and appreciations" (2). So Zoo Story, along with being seen as "a sociopolitical critique" indicting a society that values "materialism instead of humanism" (17), is also given several allegorical (Christian, existential, homosexual, psychological) readings. Or Seascape (1975) (not, as Zinman says, the first of Albee's works to win the Pulitzer, an honour earlier accorded A Delicate Balance [1966]) is discussed from the perspective of "Literary Darwinism" (79) as well as being subjected to various mythic, political, and gender approaches. One of Zinman's richest chapters considers a play thus far little analysed, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (2002), which she regards as Albee's most explicit examination of "the limits of tolerance" (141) and of the enormous difficulty of understanding "the vagaries of human passion (149). She concludes that, for the playwright, "human sexuality is more complex, far wider, deeper, and less governable than we generally think" (149). Occasionally, an observation will seem strained, as when Zinman proposes that The Sandbox (1959) be viewed as Albee's "comment on the movies [as] the Angel of Death to the theater" (34). Zinman's play-by-play format, however, never allows her to see Albee whole and compels readers to do much of the synthesizing for themselves, without an index to assist in that. Zinman does provide some connections along the way, by mentioning writers who influenced Albee (in particular Beckett, but also Ibsen and Kafka, Pinter and O'Neill, though Pirandello is unaccountably missing); by making fresh and unexpected allusions (to Einstein and Bohr and Coetzee or to Kiss Me, Kate / The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the Shakespearean green world); and by addressing both Albee's distinctive use of language (Delicate Balance, All Over [1971] and Counting the Ways [1977]) and his indebtedness to musical forms (Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung [1968], Listening [1976], and Fragments [1991]). She notices, as well, repeated narrative devices: the arrival of intruders who put other characters to a test (several plays from Zoo Story on) or the centrality of a real or illusory child (from The American Dream [1960] and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [1962] to The Play about the Baby [1998]). Finally, she points to recurrent thematic motifs that mark many of Albee's most significant works: the necessity of rejecting a too-comfortable status quo; the need to embrace "the challenge of change" (65) and the possibility for growth it brings with it; the "power of memory to reinvent reality" (120); the certainty of "loss" that accompanies "time's pressures and its passage" (8); and "the inevitably of mortality" (33) and our fear in the face of it. In citing acts of betrayal as a dominant failure on the part of Albee's characters, Zinman might well have underscored more sharply rejections [End Page 255] of the other predicated on loathing or prejudice of a sexual nature, especially in the case of the central character in Three Tall Women (1991) who ostracizes her son for his homosexuality. Of course, what frequently appears as betrayal in Albee's works from Zoo Story...

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