Playhouse Tuesdays 2.0: "What is a Legacy?": Remembering Albee

by erica wachs, prose reader

Dear Playhouse Tuesdays,

It has been a crazy couple of weeks back at school: settling into the routine of a new schedule, sitting in hours of auditions for the show I’m producing (which I will have a lot to say about in my next post), actually ingratiating it into my brain that the summer is over, and no, I can’t just sprawl out in the LA Hammer Museum courtyard and read Sarah Ruhl for three hours (remember summer?). Which is why, last night, when the New York Times notification on my phone popped up, and I absentmindedly glanced at it, I was more than taken aback reading the headline: Edward Albee has died at 88.

I have taken up a lot of space throughout Playhouse Tuesdays championing the work of modern playwrights, specifically modern female playwrights. Typically, their work is more accessible; they are the artists I can imitate or idolize. But in this process, I have not paid proper tribute to the playwrights who came before them. In this case, I’ve neglected to speak about Edward Albee, who the same New York Times post called “his generation’s foremost playwright.”

It feels almost unfair to try to sum up Albee’s legacy in a blog post, much like his obituary, and what will be said of him in the years to come will probably ring a little bit false. How can one fully pay tribute to art after the artist is gone? Through their works, their accolades? For this post, I want to speak personally about my interactions with Albee’s work, because I feel like that’s the best tribute I can give him, and the best anyone can give an artist whom they’ve admired or been inspired by. And yet, this feels almost trivial as well, to mourn this man in this manner, subject my readers to some silly musings or ramblings. Hopefully, it will be the impetus to acknowledge those who have inspired you, or even reanimate some Albee memories of your own, memories you thought were long forgotten, but were really just dormant.

The first time I interacted with any of Albee’s work was in a directing class I took at my theater camp when I was fifteen years old. Our class met in one of the camp’s basement theaters, a dank black box that smelled like mold and sunscreen. Completely out of context, I was handed a two-page scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which back then, I thought was actually written by Virginia Woolf), and asked to stage it in twenty minutes or less. I can’t actually remember the scene I was given, just that my friend, Dayna, was Martha, and George and Martha bickering reminded me of my grandparents in such a specific way, I was convinced Albee had been spying on my family. I was drawn in by the language, by the sudden jolts from tragedy to comedy to sex, all the while thinking this, these words, this scene, this is why I want to do theater. That summer, I realized at our camp’s 10-minute-play festival that I not only wanted to do theater, but more than anything, I wanted to be a playwright.

The first play I ever wrote, Grey, tells the story of three girls: Wounded Child, Adolescent Girl, and She. Throughout the course of the play, it’s revealed that they are the same person throughout different stages of life, a concept I didn’t even know I had stolen from Albee’s Three Tall Women, which operates on a similar premise. In my eleventh grade mind, I had written the Great American Play, and briefly entertained reading Albee’s version, before I was distracted by SATs and college applications.

Albee’s Three Tall Women tells the story of A, B, and C. A, a cantankerous 90-year-old woman, is dying, and is being nursed by early-fifties B and late-twenties C. Throughout the course of Act II, however, A, B, and C reveal themselves, again, to be the same woman at 90, 52, and 26. A’s son, silent and a stand-in for Albee himself, grieves for his comatose mother throughout Act II. It is a play that catapulted Albee from relative obscurity back to prominence in the 80s. But I never read it until this past summer for the playwriting class I spoke about in my last post. “Albee found humor, sympathy, and understanding in writing this play,” my playwriting TA implored to us throughout the lesson. I realized that Grey, adorably amateur in comparison, always felt as if something missing. It’s because unlike Albee, I didn’t write this play to explore sympathy and understanding. It was a playwright’s first attempt, a way to work through teenage angst. I also hadn’t lived enough life yet to find a thesis about growing up, as Albee’s characters are able to do at the end of Act II when they discuss their happiest moments. I hadn’t amassed enough stories to create a compelling A, B, or C past the age of 17. My play spoke about the pain of growing up, while Albee touched not only on the complexities of living, but also pondered the question of who will remember you when you’re gone. I owe the beginning of my playwriting career to Albee, as do countless other artists. My memories, though a bit silly and frivolous, tell a larger story about legacy:

“I was talking about… what: coming to the end of it; yes. So. There it is. You asked, after all. That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.”

A, the eldest of the three tall women, ends the play with this line. Though Albee’s “life” will live on through both his art, and the works he’s inspired, he, like A, has earned the right to stop.

Rest in happiness.

Until next time,

Erica

#playhousetuesdays #edwardalbee #ericawachs