Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958-1965

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• Educate: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Reliance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and post to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9781585678846

Description

Overlook's three-volume Collected Plays of Edward Albee finally brought together all of Albee's works for the first time. Now, as the first book is released in paperback, the first stage of Albee's great career will be brought in full to an even broader audience. The first volume of this three-volume collection contains the eight plays written by Albee during his early years as a playwright, from 1958 through 1965. Those range from the four brilliant one-act plays with which he exploded on the New York theater scene--The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream--to his early masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Also included are two adaptations from notable American novels--The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm--and Albee's mysteriously fascinating Tiny Alice. Ben Brantley of the New York Times has described him as "one of the few genuinely great living American dramatists." This book represents one of the most exciting and bold periods in the career of one of America's most popular and imaginative playwrights.

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Customer Reviews

A great anthology of a great American playwright.
The first of three collections of Edward Albee's plays. 1958-1965, I think were his best. Having them all in one place at the same time, one can truly see Albee's importance in the American theatre.
This collection is a must for any serious theatre student.

2009-12-05 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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The American Dream and Zoo Story

Description

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Customer Reviews

Two Solid Plays
The Zoo Story and The American Dream are among Edward Albee's earliest, the former being his first performed, and better-known plays. Though not on par with his masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, they are quite worthy. They are also very different from it and each other, showcasing Albee's remarkable diversity and ensuring appeal both to fans of his other work and anyone who likes well-done plays.

Zoo defines simplicity - one act, one setting, two characters, very little action - but in the best sense. Albee has the great dramatist's talent of making us feel strong suspense, even urgency, even when almost nothing actually happens. Zoo draws us in very quickly and does not let go until the last line; it is immensely engrossing. That Albee manages to hold attention so well with so few trappings testifies to his artistry. The play's content can be very quickly summarized, but its significant implications are many and varied. Part realism, part black comedy, part absurdist theater, Zoo is all interesting. Without giving away the plot, since suspense and the central mystery are so integral, Zoo deals with several important themes central to the twentieth century human condition: alienation, interpersonal communication difficulties, class, and humanity's inhumanity. Few playwrights have had such a notable debut.

The American Dream is more ambitious and probably at least as good. A whirlwind satire of the ubiquitous title subject, it satirically attacks many sacred cows. It is indirect but no less biting for that, showing Albee's early deft hand with absurdism. The play is bleak but not without humor, though the humor is quite dark, combining Greek tragedy elements with the most modern techniques. The content was near-shocking and caused quite a stir; it is important to remember that Albee's Preface says the play is meant to offend. It now seems superficially tame, but anyone alive to the real issues sees that it is as provoking and penetrating as ever. The play gives much to think about - especially if we realize our laughter is in self-defense.

All told, though Who's Afraid is the Albee play of choice, anyone interested in him should look into these.

2010-07-03 (Oklahoma, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Good Book
The shipping was good. Well timed and the book's condition was good shape. The actual book was great, especially Grandma in "The American Dream."

2010-03-27 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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The American Dream
Edward Albee's Play, "The American Dream" uses absurdist elements to mock the American society, exposing its most controversial topics into normal conversation. By doing so, Albee gives us an inside look at the ugly truth; which may allow one to question their morals and motives while reading. Albee is successful in twisting ones sense of consciousness. By breaking things down into simple and casual dialogue, Albee is able to get away with the most remarkably crude humor; something that may be at first startling to the reader allows for a chaotic plot line and suspenseful story.

2010-02-12 (new london, ct) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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not into plays neither am i
well at least i thought i wasnt. but these two plays are very easy to read and i think theyd also be brilliant to see if only i got the chance. edward albee, pretty much the only playwright i like so far. but he makes me give the area a chance. these two are a great way to get into him and into plays in general.

2008-08-21 | peanuts for nuts (i get around) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A theatre MASTER piece
These plays are modern classics. Albee has an interesting view of our modern word (especially the american way of life) and expresses it really good in his theatre plays. Zoo story specially is a 'must do it' play for all the actors

2007-08-10 (Madrid, Spain) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Delicate Balance

Description

Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning play--winner of the 1996 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play--is now available in a trade paperback edition. A dark comedy about unfulfilled lives, broken promises, and family jealousies, A Delicate Balance has just been revived to triumphant acclaim at Lincoln Center's Plymouth Theatre in New York City.

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Customer Reviews

Purchase for AP Literatures
Purchases book for my daugther's AP Literature class. Loved the quickness of the delivery. I am always satisfied with Amazon.

2009-09-24 | MizzTech (Chicago, IL USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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my favorite Albee play
Edward Albee is best-known for his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a Broadway classic that was made into a film starring a young Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. However, this play, A Delicate Balance, is my favorite out of Albee's plays, and I've read nearly all of them. It won Albee the first of his 3 Pulitzer Prizes, and was made into a film starring Katherine Hepburn.

The story focuses on an aging WASP couple, Agnes and Tobias. Agnes' alcoholic sister, Claire, lives with the couple. Then events, or rather people, intrude into this carefully ordered household. First, two old friends, Harry and Edna, arrive without warning and ask to stay for an indeterminate time. Then Julia, the daughter of Agnes and Tobias, also asks for refuge. Cracks form in the veneer of control and peace that Agnes has cultivated. The character of Claire (a delightful drunk if there ever was one) steals the show as she alternately mocks the situation and tries to help the people involved.

As in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the characters occupy intensely charged domestic landscapes, inner spaces of anxiety and dread, and the climaxes of both plays are punctuated by speeches from the main characters. These monologues roll out with a cathartic force equivalent to operatic arias. True to its title, though, the play as a whole feels restrained and delicate, its turmoil gurgling underneath.

Since Albee is a playwright who is extremely sensitive to the musical, rhythmic aspect of drama, his plays can unfold in a reader's mind as easily, and perhaps more perfectly than if they were realized on a stage. Albee himself has compared playwrights' scripts to musical scores. Like a musician who can read music and then "hear" it in his mind, those readers who are comfortable reading dramatic dialogue and stage directions can easily experience A Delicate Balance in the privacy of their rooms.

2008-10-05 | datura2002 (Houston, TX) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Among His Best; My Favorite
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" will be the play that is revived again and again over years, like Hellman's "Little Foxes," because middle-aged stars will be asked what they'd like to do and, inevitably, this is the play of choice, but like Hellman's lesser-known "Another Part of the Forest," this play by Albee is his best. It is less flashy, less loud, less dramatic, but it is deeper and more moving. It 'plays' to the women in the audience, I suppose, because Agnes is more interesting of the characters, more so than Tobias. The Harry and Edna characters are mere shadows of the lead couple, in fact one can see them as alter-egos of the two leads, their lesser or better halves, depending on how one sees it. Anyway, Harry and Edna come to visit one night and then want to stay. Their intrusion or invasion, if you like, sets the house afire, and Albee has a field day working out what in the end is a reasonably challenging moral dilemma: let them stay or throw them out? Of course, there are cultures for which this would not be such a crisis, but for WASPS issues of 'sharing' and of 'giving' get to the heart of what love is, and Albee suggests these people might not have any love to give.

2007-07-15 | Almawood (Kansas, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Brilliant dialogue, witty, sarcastic, and sad

This is the first of Edward Albee's plays to garner the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. The other two were Seascape and Three Tall Women. Probably his most popular is Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

A Delicate Balance is comprised of brilliant dialogue, mostly short snippets, and some very meaningful longer dialogue. It is dialogue that offers sarcastic humor and provides a continuity of mystery that provokes thought. There are not excessive stage directions or character descriptions, it is all in the dialogue.

To view this onstage would take a great stage direction and better castmembers who can pull it off with intense theatrical skill as Albee intended.

Tobias and Agnes are a well-to-do middle-age couple's questionable balance in life is disrupted when "hangers on" invade their space. At home is Agnes' alcoholic, witty younger sister Claire (mid 30's) and their four times married daughter Julia is coming back home, routinely. Harry and Edna, dear friends of Tobias and Agnes come to stay because they are fearful and we are kept wondering what has them so scared that they need to leave their own home.

Things get heated when Julia arrives, again, and Harry and Edna take up her room and she retaliates furiously, openly and child-like. We learn that Tobias had an affair, they had a son who died young, and they have not slept together for years.

This is a great play that focuses on the truth and illusion in marriage, a popular theme of Albee's. The first performance in New York Sept. 1966 starred Hume Cronyn and his wife, Jessica Tandy, two of the best in theatre. That would have been a great performance. .....MzRizz

2006-09-27 (Denver, CO) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Who is mad?
Agnes open the play with a monologue in which she contemplates the possibility that one day, unexpectedly, she might turn mad. She says she contemplates it with astonishment, but she does not sound very astonished at all, she is more... fashinated by the idea. Her husband is listening, but not listening at all as if he could not hear Agnes, or her talking about the possibility of becoming mad was perfectly normal, or she has been mad a long time and he discounts her.
I won't spoil the play, but (for me) it is an interesting investigation in what it means to be mad. Indeed it is not clear who is mad, probably all of them, possibly none. The bounderies of madness are not clearly drawn and characters seem to shift in and out of it on a continuous basis. Rules of the polite society are called into question. Is it mad to break them or to upkeep them?

The play is enjoyable to read, but not overly so, it is above everything else, enjoyable to think about.

2004-01-10 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1966 - 1977

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9781590200537
• Equip: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Nerve, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and putting into play to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

Edward Albee's many awards and recognitions--including three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama (a number exceeded only by Eugene O'Neill's four), three Tony Awards, the Gold Medal in Drama by the Academy if Arts and Letters, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the National Medal of the Arts--only confirm his tremendous talents and stature in the arts community.

Albee's oeuvre consists of more than twenty-six plays, the earliest of which were collected in Volume One of his Collected Plays. Volume Two contains the nine plays written by Albee in the period between 1966 and 1977, ranging from the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance to the brilliant and complex short plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung to his second Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Seascape, to the controversial Lady from Dubuque (hailed by Time magazine as "a major work...Albee's best since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?")

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Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (Applause Books)

Product Details

• 448 Pages
• Softcover
• Published by Applause Books

Description

Mel GussowÕs critically-acclaimed biography of the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (SEASCAPE, A DELICATE BALANCE, THE ZOO STORY), who first electrified the American theatre scene in the 1960s with his groundbreaking THE ZOO STORY followed by the now legendary WHOÕS AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

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With his off-Broadway success The Zoo Story in 1960 and the Broadway smash Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962, Edward Albee announced himself as his generation's great American playwright. He had an unhappy childhood as the adopted son of wealthy suburbanites with no interest in his feelings or talents, and later immersed himself in the flourishing (but still closeted) New York gay scene of the 1950s. These seminal experiences gave Albee a sardonic, essentially bleak view of human relations that suited the questioning spirit of the '60s, as did his plays' absurdist tone and often experimental techniques. Alcoholism and bad reviews plagued him through much of the 1970s and '80s, but he emerged triumphant and sober in 1994 with the play Three Tall Women, which marked his mature understanding of his mother's life and won him a third Pulitzer Prize. Mel Gussow observed much of this personal and professional journey as a theater critic and an acquaintance; his book is a traditional biography based on research and interviews--with colleagues and friends as well as Albee himself--that also judiciously uses the author's firsthand experiences. (A section about the playwright's drunken rudeness at a dinner party and subsequent apologetic letter to Gussow is particularly revealing.) Gussow limns his subject's life with candor, but without prurience, and lucidly conveys Albee's importance in the American theater. --Wendy Smith

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Customer Reviews

Edward Albee A Singular Journey
I have not finished, but am completely enjoying the life story of one of America's finest playwrights. I became intrigued by something on the internet and then purchased this book. Before long I needed to read some
of his plays. I began with his Pulitzer Prize winning "Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" I am really getting a deep picture of Edward Albee and
highly recommend "A Singular Journey" for anyone who loves the whole process of writing and sharing our life stories. This book was written by
Mel Gussow, thanks to him and the wonderful Edward Albee, readers will
travel for a time through the life and mind of one incredibly brilliant
individual.

2008-06-09 (New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Brilliant
I received this book as a gift from the author's son and daughter-in-law. It's simply an amazing story, perhaps the only thing more amazing than Gussow's writing is the man that he writes about. Gussow captures Albee's natural speaking wit and amazing story in an absolutely brilliant way.

2007-06-23 | jimbodhizzle (Columbia, MO USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Is Albee America's Shakespeare?
Gussow admires and likes Albee and one supposes that is a good thing, but one wonders if that is enough to recommend this author for the job of writing Edward Albee's biography. Many will say so, of course, because of Gussow's credentials as a theater buff. If you see playwriting as a branch of the show biz trade, then surely Gussow is your man, but if prefer to speak of Ibsen and Chekhov in the same breath as Zola and Turgenev, that is, if one sees plays as part of literature, and wishes to speak of the theater beyond box office receipts and stardom, then maybe this star-gazing journalist could be bettered. I got tired of Gussow's praise for Albee's so-called political consciousness coupled with his admiration for Albee's talent for making real estate deals. Hypocritical radical chic seems so very yesterday. Albee's career follows more or less the course of Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward; early fame was followed by years of critical scorn and popular indifference. Unlike them, Albee has had a late-term come back. Revivals open annually as do new works. Yet, what somebody has to do is evaluate their worth. Saying it is all wonderful simply will not do.

2007-06-22 | Almawood (Kansas, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Informative page-turner for an Albee fan
Albee is without doubt my favorite living playwright, so I'm a little biased, but I read and enjoyed this book, and felt like I got to know Albee a lot better in the process, without losing any of my respect for him.
Since his plays are so much about family and the pursuit of "success", it's worthwhile to know about how Albee--who was adopted--grew up. I recommend this to anyone who admires Albee's plays, and also to sceptics who want more insight on the ideas and the man behind them.

2005-08-09 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Good, but not for everyone
This is a very good biography of Albee, and the best book available on the great playwright, but for those who consider 'The Zoo Story' and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' to be his sole significant works should look for lighter reading. The book refuses to be salacious, sticks to the facts and offers very to-the-point criticism on Albee's plays. Albee emerges as a figure of some mystery and extraordinary talent. The book does not find any powerful new insight as in, for example, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, but the book does move along nicely and is highly informative.
Overall, a good read for Albee's fans.
(By the way, what's up with all of the short 1-star reviews of the book, does someone have a personal vendetta against the author?)

2004-09-05 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee

Description

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