The following interview transcript with Edward
Albee has been carefully broken down into
segments involving a variety of topics. Below
each segment is a link to the corresponding
video clip. Please attribute research sources to
Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William
Inge Center for the Arts.
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Advice to Writers: Remove the Monologue |
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There is that terrible thing that usually
happens in first or second plays played on
playwrights that – never the lead character, but
usually a subsidiary, an important enough
subsidiary character, oddly enough resembles the
author and acts as the author’s mouthpiece and
usually stops the action of the play two-thirds
of the way through to deliver a very long
monologue explaining what the play is about and
why this particular character is so wonderful.
And I try to persuade my students to remove that
character from the play if they possibly can, or
certainly remove that speech.
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Advice to Writers: Write Only What is Necessary |
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Sometimes they haven’t written enough and I want
them to write longer. That of course is a form
of editing. I tell them to leave only what is
absolutely essential, what’s necessary – to
remove and to add depending upon getting what
they are after as clearly as they possibly can.
I don’t tell them that there are any forms that
they must follow, that they should invent
theater every time they write a play, because
most plays are two hours long it does not mean
that a play should be two hours long. And that
most plays have five characters doesn’t mean
they have to have five characters, that most
plays are naturalistic certainly doesn’t mean
they have to write naturalistic plays. They must
invent the theater every time they write a play
too. I try to help them make their plays as
close to what they think they’ve done as they
possibly can, then you find out if it was worth
doing. But I don’t try to make them follow
rigid formulae or accepted standards. If
someone wants to write a three minute play and
it’s perfect, that’s great. If they want to
write a twelve hour play and that’s as long as
it should be, super. But if that twelve hour
play should be 11 hours and 58 minutes, I make
sure they make it 11 hours and 58 minutes rather
than 12 hours.
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Advice to writers: Trust your Instinct |
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I’ve always trusted my instinct. And sometimes
my instinct runs absolutely counter to what’s
best for me, probably. Not too often. But it
certainly runs counter to accepted behavior.
But I can’t much care about that. I used to be
a much shyer person than I am now. Now I find
that if I want to say something I’ll just say it
right out loud. It’s the only way to avoid
regret.
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Advice to Writers: Question your Values |
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The important thing is to keep questioning your
own values, because you do get trapped into
accepting certain things that you no longer
believe. One of the reasons that I enjoy
teaching and enjoy lecturing and even from
time-to-time doing interviews and discussions is
that sometimes I discover that I’ve changed my
mind about something. And someone will ask me a
question and I’ll discover that my instinctive
answer is contrary to other things that I
thought I believed – and that’s interesting,
always. We must never become rigid and
formulated in our response to stimuli.
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Advice to writers: Affect People’s Consciousness |
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Well, you see I write fairly indirectly. What I
try to do is affect people’s consciousness.
That’s awfully hard to see the results of. If
one were writing a polemic, if one were writing
an agitprop piece, then maybe you could see
things a lot quicker. I don’t know. In my play
The Death of Bessie Smith maybe
unconsciously affect a few people’s attitude
towards blacks. I hope so. It would be nice.
I hope that all of my plays have rubbed off in
some area of people’s perception of what it’s
like to be conscious. I hope so. Certainly I
wouldn’t have been wasting my time if it
hasn’t. But people don’t come up to you very
often and say, “Wow, I saw that play and that
has changed my life. I now live very
differently.” People do come up and say, “I
still think about it,” and “that upset me and I
started thinking about it.” I’m aware that
people are affected by what I’ve done, but I
can’t point out specifically that a person has
lived his life differently as a result of what
I’ve done.
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Advice to Writers: Don’t be Threatened by
Excellence |
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I'm always amazed by that, that people are
threatened by excellence. If they're good
enough, they're not going to be threatened by
excellence. You know, they may go out of
fashion. The theatre always likes to have new
saviors. It's very interesting, you survive
long enough and you watch the new saviors be
turned against by the same critics who built
them up, and you watch, they come, they go
down. But the very good people go on. There's
no threat. Excellence is not a threat. There's
never enough excellence. God, I wish there were
ten times as many great playwrights as there
are. The world would be a much better place.
Nobody should be threatened by excellence.
Ever.
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Theater in the Sixties |
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Then we began to have a situation in the early
Sixties where the off-Broadway theater was
burgeoning, and new work – not only by the
European avant-garde but also by young unknown
American playwrights started being done at least
in New York City, and the spreading around the
country. And even on Broadway occasionally, new
work – serious new plays were being performed.
Then all of that good stuff started to collapse
with the enormous expenses of Broadway
production, with the deadening effect on the
Broadway audience of critics who were instructed
to praise only those plays or hired so they
would praise only those plays which did not rock
the boat and then kept our theaters safe for
white, middle-brow audiences. It’s very
difficult. It’s as difficult now for a serious
play by an unknown playwright to be done in our
commercial theaters as it was back in the
middle-fifties. It may even be uglier now.
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The Zoo Story:
Theme |
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I don’t notice that I have changed all that much
actually. From the very beginning some of the
things I’ve been writing about include the fact
that people do not live their own lives
completely, that they go to sleep
intellectually, philosophically, morally even –
very young. That they don’t keep questioning
their own values. That they end up, when it’s
too late to do anything about it, discovering
that they are filled with regret and that they
haven’t lived complete lives. They’ve lied to
themselves, they’ve lied to other people,
they’ve become rigid – these are things that
have concerned me from the very beginning,
certainly even in The Zoo Story, that
first play. The argument was between someone who
was a rebel against almost all social standards,
and somebody who was acclimating too quickly and
closing down by the age of forty. From the very
beginning those have been my concerns. And
since people don’t pay a great deal of attention
to how I want them to live, they don’t change
all that much and so I have to keep writing
about the same stuff over and over again, like
all writers do.
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The Zoo Story:
Path to Production |
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Well, when The Zoo Story occurred, here
was I, a totally unknown individual having
written an hour long rather unpleasant
two-character play. And also there wasn’t much
of an off-Broadway in those days. Obviously the
Broadway producers were not interested in it.
And there was not much off-Broadway to be
interested in it. But by a very elaborate,
circuitous set of circumstances, the play ended
up in Berlin though a composer friend of mine
who sent it to his teacher in Florence who sent
it to a good friend in Zurich who translated it
and sent it to a woman he knew who ran the
theater department of the S. Fischer publishing
house in Frankfurt who liked it and sent it to a
theater director in Berlin who put it on on a
double bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape,
which I just finished directing here in Houston
by the way interestingly enough – Krapp’s
Last Tape in English though, I hope. And
then six-months later it was done in New York in
English on a double bill again with Krapp’s
Last Tape. So it wasn’t as tough…it was
circuitous but it wasn’t as tough a route as
most playwrights you hear about, five or six
years from the first play to the first
production and the first play doesn’t get done
until the third play gets done. I had it fairly
easy.
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Albarwild, Inc. |
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We did start our theater which we named every
year – Theater ’62, ’63, ’64, and we managed to
produce in better than workshop situations 120
plays in ten years, including most of the
playwrights who’ve come into any kind of
prominence now. I think we produced the first
plays of Sam Shepard and maybe John Guare and
Terrence McNally and Adrian Kennedy and LeRoi
Jones – a whole list of them. We did a lot of
good work. It was very useful.Of course we got
a lot of first-rate actors and directors who
were happy to work with us for free. In those
days there was a very enthusiastic younger
audience for the off-off-Broadway experience.
In fact we’d only charge $2.00 to get into the
production. It made it a lot easier for young
people to come. But then again most people
wanted to see what was new in the arts back in
the early ‘60’s.
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Richard Barr: Producer |
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I think he produced probably 16 or so of my 26
plays, so obviously we had a good relationship.
A producer should (a) be a man who cares deeply
about the theater. If he’s going to be serious
producer he should care deeply about the serious
theater. He should be sensitive, intelligent,
courageous, and a sensible business man at the
same time. He should understand that the
theater begins with the writer, that that is the
creative artist and that the interpretive
artists are enormously important in taking the
play from the page to the stage, but that it is
not a joint enterprise in the sense that
everybody is creating and has the right to
rewrite a play, to modify and alter a play. A
producer ideally should only produce a play that
he admires. He should not produce a play that
he thinks will need a lot of work and that maybe
can be molded into something the public can
accept. So Richard Barr - who produced not only
so many of my plays but so many plays by Samuel
Beckett and Ionesco and so many other
provocative avant-garde and new playwrights -
fulfilled all of those criteria. He’s a good
man.
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Alan Schneider: Director |
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Alan directed I guess twelve or thirteen of my
plays and taught me a great deal about being a
director. It’s one of the reasons that I
started directing my own work and other people’s
work. Yes, what a good relationship. He was an
honorable and consciences and talented director
and he taught me a lot of the things that a
director is going to expect out of a playwright,
and a lot of the things that a director should
not expect from a playwright. Well, he didn’t
teach me what not to expect. He told what to
expect. He had respect for the play. He didn’t
direct many plays that he didn’t like either.
But he did expect a playwright to be able to
justify and explain every single thing he wrote,
which is a reasonable explanation. And so he
enabled me to start thinking about my craft in
ways that I hadn’t thought about it before. But
I was wise enough to realize that even though I
was learning how to think about my craft, I
shouldn’t think about my craft when I’m writing
a play. I should just let that happen – let the
spontaneity occur. Yes, those are two
enormously important influences in my life, and
Clinton Wilder came along and joined – Richard
Barr became his co-producer and he was another
bright and sensitive and intelligent man. And
we had Bill Ritman who designed the sets for
most of my plays. And the sad thing about all
that is all four of them are dead. We’ve lost
all four of them in the last seven or eight
years. It makes you feel a little lonely
sometimes.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
Obscene? |
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It was hard to understand at the time. You see
people translated something. What they were
receiving was emotional violence and they
translated it into verbal violence, and accused
the play of being obscene and profane in ways
that it never was, verbally.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
Censorship |
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Back in the days when we did Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, in Boston the Catholic
Church was able to censor the theater, censor
plays. And they tried to censor Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? and we just ran right
over them. We wouldn’t let them do it. And
that ended the church’s control of censorship in
Boston. Lord Chamberlain’s office when we did
the play in London wanted to have 78 changes. I
had a meeting with him, nodded my head a lot,
then went back and told my cast, “Do it exactly
the way we did it in New York.” Then there was
no problem there. Then a few years later Lord
Chamberlain’s office went out of business. That
was nice.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
A Critic Helps |
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Look, when Virginia Woolf opened on
Broadway, the critic, bless him, for one of the
minor NY newspapers, The Mirror, or
something like that...The Telegram...said
this is a play that should be seen only by
dirty-minded women. I bet that added a year to
the run of the play. I'm absolutely delighted.
You can use this stuff to your own advantage.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
The Cast |
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Virginia Woolf
was first done in 1972 with Uta Hagan and Arthur
Hill. I directed a production in 1976 with
Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara. I don't
believe it's been done in New York since then.
It's time for yet another production in New
York. I directed a production in Los Angeles a
little over a year ago with Glenda Jackson and
John Lithgow, and then I mentioned that I
directed another production here in Houston that
went on and toured the country. There's talk of
another national tour starting in the autumn
that I haven't approved casting. They want me to
direct that, and I've got to find out whether I
have time.
(CUT WITH ABOVE) You try to have actors who are
capable of becoming the characters. You have
first-rate actor without an over-weaning ego,
for people to see the actor on stage rather than
the character. First rate actors become the
character. They become the character in
different ways. Arthur Hill, Ben Gazzara, John
Lithgow, to mention just three Georges in WAVW
are very different actors. They look different,
they sound different. They were trained
differently, but they all three of them were
first rate actors, and they all became the
character, without distorting the character.
That's what a good actor does.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
The Pulitzer Prize |
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The Pulitzer Prize used to be voted, or judged
rather, by a qualified jury of theater
professionals. In the instance of the year that
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? both did
and did not receive the Pulitzer Prize. John
Mason Brown and John Gastner and somebody else,
I forget who it was, maybe Richard Watts, were
the jurors. They unanimously voted the Pulitzer
Prize to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In those days, whether it’s still true or not I
don’t know, a group of fifteen newspaper editors
from around the country had to pass on the
recommendations of the qualified jurors. By a
vote of 8 to 7, they decided not to award the
prize to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
because it was too, what, too controversial.
It contained language that it did not contain.
I have absolutely no idea. And The New York
Times, bless them – they do something right
every once in a while, called them up, these
newspaper editors, and found that of the eight
that had voted against – they had split eight to
seven, seven to give it the prize, eight not to
give it the prize – of the eight who had voted
against it, only three of them had either seen
or read the play, so that they were voting with
an innocence uncorrupted by experience. So I
don’t know whether I got the Pulitzer Prize for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or not.
I think I did. I think I got it but they
wouldn’t give it to me.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
The Film |
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As Beckett says, better than a kick in the
teeth. I had a number of quarrels with it. I
don't know why they made it in black and white.
I wrote it in color. I don't know why they
thought that a 32 year old actress could play a
52 year-old -woman. I have no idea. Elizabeth
Taylor did a very good job, and Martha's meant
to be 52, so they changed the age in the film to
46 and made the age of the non-existent child
16, but it's important that Martha be 6 years
older than George, and it's important that the
non-existent child get exorcised on the eve of
its 21st birthday, while it's still a minor,
before it attains its majority. Why they
thought that they should leave the intentionally
claustrophobic environment of the living room to
go to a stupid roadhouse, to go out under a tree
in a swing, to go up to the bedroom, to go to
the kitchen, why they felt they had to do all of
this nonsense, I don't know. But having said
all of they--and why they had to put that
tedious film score in it. I saw a rough cut
before the film score was in, and it was much
better. Having said all of that, it was
probably better than I had any reason to
expect. It was fairly accurate. My only real
major objection to it is that the play is both
very serious and very funny. The movie is very
serious and humorless. Nowhere near as funny as
it is on stage. Maybe Mike Nichols, who had
made his reputation as a stand-up comic was
trying to prove how serious he was, I don't
know, but I missed the humor. Maybe I just
missed the interaction of the live audience with
live actors. It's possible I just missed that.
It wasn't a bad picture. But the film that they
made of A Delicate Balance with Paul Scofield
and Katharine Hepburn, Tony Richardson
directing, was probably much closer to the
author's intention.
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Tiny Alice |
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It becomes pretty clear on stage. I sort of
supervised a production of it in Chicago at a
small theatre this past autumn. It's a
perfectly straight-forward metaphysical
melodrama. It deals with a relationship between
religious martyrdom and sexual hysteria; it
deals with reality and illusion; it deals with
corruption of absolute power and absolute
wealth; it deals with selling out; it deals
with...all that stuff.
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Seascape |
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Well, the ending is again ambiguous, as I try to
make most of the endings for my plays. When
Charlie and Nancy tell the lizards, don't go
back down. You shouldn't. I mean, you're going
to disrupt evolution if you do. But stay, we
can help you. This giant male lizard stands up
to his full height and says, "All Right,
begin." And that is not, "all right begin save
me." No, that's a threat. "Don't screw up."
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The Man Who Had Three Arms |
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Oh, well I had some fun with the interview
process and the overcooked chicken and peas and
awful gravy lecture circuit. But the one thing
that the play was not about – it was not about
me. It was about a freak, a man with no talent
aside from growing a third arm and as the third
arm went away the life disintegrated. But the
New York critics, bless them, decided to review
something totally other and they destroyed the
play which is a shame since I think audiences
would have enjoyed it a lot.
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Adaptations |
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Well, some of them were more accepted than
others. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe was very
nicely received. The adaptation of James
Purdy's Malcolm was liked by five people, James
Purdy, me, Alan Schneider who directed it,
Richard Barr who produced it and I think one
other person liked it. Everything in the Garden
was a translation from English into American of
a British play that went very nicely. A nice
commercial production. My adaptation of
Nabakov's Lolita was never performed. A
travesty of it was performed, but my play was
never performed.
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Sequels |
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Well, then let that happen in the mind of the
audience. If I were capable of....anxious to
write a sequel, it would mean to me that I
hadn't done my job thoroughly the first time
through. I'd rather leave the audience wanting
more than less. You know if you want to know
more about the characters, invent it in your own
mind. Become the writer. Do it yourself. I'd
rather you want to do that than say, "God, I
learned too much about that one. Anytime.
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The Influence of Music |
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I wanted to be a composer when I was 12, 13,
14. I discovered Bach and Mozart and I figured
that was something nice to be doing. I started
writing before that and I used to paint and draw
when I was even younger than that, but I wanted
to be a composer – but I was incompetent. I
couldn’t learn how to read music or play the
piano very well, so I didn’t become a composer.
But I became enormously and have remained
enormously knowledgeable in classical music –
all periods of it. I probably know more than
just about any layman I know about classical
music. And I discovered somewhere along the
line that there is a profound relationship
between drama and classical music. After all,
the play is made up of sound and silence. Music
is made up of sound and silence. Duration is
enormously important – duration of sound,
duration of silence – both in music and in
drama. I also realized that a playwright uses
notation very much the way a composer does, that
the difference in duration of pause between a
semi-colon and a period is the same as indicated
by a composer in rests between notes. Then I
started analyzing what Chekhov was doing and
what Beckett was doing – the two great teachers
of the music of theater in the 20th
Century – and I began to realize that they
instinctively understood the relationship
between music and drama. Plus there is a formal
relationship, the psychological structure of a
string quartet and the psychological structure
of a player, closely related. But having said
all that, I don’t want to get any more specific
because I’ll probably get in trouble – show
myself to be foolish, more foolish than I
usually am willing to show myself to be.
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Samuel Beckett |
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Anybody who's not influenced by the greatest
playwright of the second half of the 20th
century is a damned fool. He reinvented drama,
explored possibilities and potentials of drama
that we hadn't been aware of before. A
profoundly important playwright. Not everybody
should go around trying to write like him.
Harold Pinter gets in trouble for writing,
because he writes too much like Beckett
sometimes. But the things that there are to
learn about economy, clarity, precision--aside
from the philosophical stuff--a terribly
important playwright.
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Directing my own Plays: Part 1 |
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I started directing my work very early on, about
1963 or so, ’64, and I was dreadful. I was a
terrible director. And so I would watch Alan
direct my work and I was sort of going around
the world watching other directors direct my
work – Peter Hall, Ingmar Bergman, Franco
Zeffirelli, Jean Louis Perot(?) – people like
that, and so I started thinking conscientiously
about what it was like to direct, and kept on
directing my own works since they couldn’t stop
be because I was the author. And I finally
learned how to be a good director. I think if a
playwright can learn how to be a good director,
he can probably give an audience a closer
representation of what he as a playwright
intended when he wrote the play than anybody
else possibly can. But of course there are some
playwrights who should not direct their work or
anybody else’s work. There are some playwrights
who shouldn’t even be allowed in the theater
during rehearsals. It’s the only way to stop
them from changing their work to its detriment.
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Directing my own Plays: Part 2 |
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Oh, I’m the writer. I can change whatever I
want about what I’ve written if I feel like it,
but I don’t want anybody else to mess with my
text. And I’ve discovered that as a director I
am far more liable to have conversations with
myself as author and probably make more profound
changes in my text than I would let any other
director make, probably because I trust myself
more and even greater than that, I know I have
greater access to what I really intended. But
the crafts are different. The writer attempts
the impossible. The director can only do what’s
possible. And so when I direct my own work I
try to move the impossible a little bit closer
to the possible, without distorting it, without
oversimplifying it, without changing it.
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Teaching in Texas |
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Well over the years, over the past fifteen years
or so I’ve been doing a lot of lectures and
short residencies, month-long residencies at
various Universities around the country. I do a
lot of that. And I started coming to Houston to
do some lectures over the past six, seven, eight
years – University of Saint Thomas, University
of Houston, this or that in Houston and around
the rest of Texas also and I guess the
reputation sort of following after that I was
fairly interesting and provocative and worked
well with students, so I was invited to do a
month-long residency at the University of
Houston about five or six years ago directing
three of my shorter plays and running some
workshops. That went nicely and then I got
invited to be a member of the faculty and teach
playwriting. Well, I said maybe one semester a
year, so I ended up doing the spring semester,
and you can’t teach playwriting and went through
the usual business – I said, “I don’t want to do
a survey course of 20th Century
Drama, I don’t want to lecture, I don’t want to
do this. If you can give me a couple of courses
that I can do workshops with young playwrights
and help them develop their craft, fine. And
the only other condition that I would impose is
that I get to choose my students. And they
agreed to all that. So this is the third or
fourth year that I’ve been on faculty – half a
year. What am I called: Distinguished Professor
of Drama, which is a big kick for me for
somebody who got thrown out of college in the
middle of his sophomore year. (laughs).
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Houston’s Alley Theatre |
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You know, Houston prides itself on being pretty
good in the arts, and the Alley Theatre is the
one of the best regional theatres in the
country. The Alley Theatre had done only two
Beckett productions in 32 years. It astonishes
me, because audiences don't accept Beckett. He
is a great playwright, which is the kiss of
death, and he's meant to be avant-garde, which
is the kiss of death also. Death kisses on both
cheeks, when you think about somebody like
Beckett. I thought the Alley Theatre, as a
responsible regional theatre should be doing
Beckett all the time, and so I persisted and
kept hounding them. I direct here a lot. I
directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
here last year that went around the country and
then to Leningrad and also to Lithuania. And I
directed the Death of Bessie Smith and another
play called Counting the Ways at their theatre a
couple of years before that. I get done a lot
at the Alley Theatre. But I said, "come on, you
should be doing Beckett." And they finally
said, "Okay, do some Beckett." And, since I
love Krapp's Last Tape, and Ohio
Impromptu is an extraordinary, spare little
play that knocked me for a loop when I saw it in
New York. I wanted to do the two of them
together, so I did. People seemed to be--once
they put away their expectations, that they're
going to be at Harvey or
something--they're having a splendid time, which
is happening on the big stage at the Alley
Theatre, while the Beckett is happening
downstairs, at the small theatre.
MW: Harvey's upstairs.
EA: Harvey's upstairs. I mean, comeon.
The way of the world.
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Productions in the Soviet Union |
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I started going to the Soviet Union and eastern
Europe in 1963, and I go with great frequency.
I have a lot of friends in eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union. They never tell before hand.
I always learn about the productions of my plays
after the fact in the Soviet Union. I am the
most performed living American playwright in the
Soviet Union. Performed all the time there. I
don't get any royalties or anything.
MW: Is that right?
EA: Yeah. Because the Soviet Union joined the
copyright league in 1976 or something, and the
way the Soviet mind works, the copyright league
did not exist until we joined it, and therefore
any play written before we joined the copyright
league is not protected by copyright. And so
they do my plays written before 1976, and they
don't pay any royalties. It's nice that they're
done.
MW: What's the theatre audience like there?
How are they different from American audiences?
EA: They are not jaded. They are not blasé.
They are an expense account audience. They go
because they love the theatre. That simple.
They don't go because there are stars. They
don't go because it's the fashionable thing to
do. They don't go because they'll be able to
say before their neighbor that they've been to
the latest hit. None of that stuff. They go
because they care for the theatre. I find this
true in most countries aside from the United
States.
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Theatre Today |
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I don't know what the culprit is? I think
basically it is an audience that has been
trained to expect far less from the theatre than
the theatre is capable of giving and the fact
that the commercial theatre is not exposing
people to the very best theatre. Right now on
Broadway, here's an interesting list of
playwrights who are not being performed on
Broadway right now: Sophocles, Aristophanes,
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Moliere, Racine, Chekhov,
Ibsen, Strindberg, Gorky, Pirandello, Beckett,
Ionesco, Genet. These playwrights are not being
performed on Broadway now. What the hell kind
of theatre is that!
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Apathy |
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The danger of the United States is less, I
think, from the far Right in this country than
it is from the general apathy of the populace
which doesn't bother to educate itself on the
issues and elections, doesn't know the quality
of the people they're voting for, doesn't bother
to vote, is not informed on the issues. Our
apathy as a society, not only in the arts, but
in politics and ethics and everything else,
contributes to the ability of dangerous people
to run our society. And the value of the arts
is in the ability to try to keep waking people
up. That's why the arts are useful, why they're
not really decorative. They're there to wake
people up, to question the status quo. Say,
"Come on; participate in your own lives more."
Which means participating aesthetically,
emotionally, intellectually, philosophically,
all ways. That's why art is useful. And that's
why art that tries to do that the most is the
least popular.
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Confounding the Audience |
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Sometimes, I have fun. I will put things in
these plays to confound people, secret little
things, like: nobody knew--a couple of people
knew--in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Act 3, opening scene, Martha says, "Up the
drain, down the spout, dead gone and forgotten,
the poker night." Very few people know that
that's a quote from Streetcar, and that the
Poker Night was the original title of
Streetcar. I put that in there to amuse
Tennessee when he came to see the play. But I
had much more fun in other things. Sometimes,
in some of my plays, I will have somebody say
something, like a quote, and then say to the
other character, "who said that?" This sends
the scholars looking for the source, and of
course I always made them up. And you can have
fun when, when they think at the end of the
second act, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
George is quoting from Spangler. He's
not. I made the quote up completely. This
stuff is fun.
MW: You're helping publishers for years to
come.
EA: God knows the number of books that ended up
being written incorrectly when I said
semi-facetiously that George and Martha were
named after George and Martha Washington,
because the play is about the failed principles
of the American Revolution. That really started
a lot of books going.
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Why I Write |
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I write to find out what's going on in my head.
I always have ideas for plays. They come into
focus, and I write them down, and I know why I
wrote them down. I usually have three or four
plays swimming around in my head somewhere. I'm
writing one right now, not this instant we're
talking, but these days, and I have two others
that are lined up, like aircraft waiting to get
clearance to land, that are waiting to be
written down. I don't examine the process
terribly carefully, because I think it's
dangerous to. As James Thurber said, let your
mind alone. It knows what it's doing.
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