Edward Albee: Contribution as American Dramatist

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      Edward Albee (1928-2016) was a great American playwright of the Absurd Theatre, He was born in Washington DC who made his spectacular debut with his four one cat plays - The Zoo Story (1958), The Death of the Bessie Smith (1960). The Sandbox (1962) and The American Dream (1960). Who Is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became his best Broadway production in 1962. By this time, he was greeted as the leader of a new theatrical movement and as a major American playwright. In his middle phase plays Albee pursued an increasingly rarified style, one that is emotionally and sexually evasive and that often forsaken dramatic impact for mandarin elegance. Later, he wrote some adoptions, short chamber plays and also full-length plays.

      Albee, made an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, in 1979. Among the later is A Delicate Balance which won him the Pulitzer Prize in which Harry and Edna carry mysterious psychic plague into their best friends’ living room. Other plays are The Lady from Dubuque (1979), Seascape (1975) The Man who had Three Arms (1981). Marriage Play is the mainstream of his plays of 2000 along with Fragments (1993), Three Tall Women (1991), Play about the Baby (1998), The Occupant (2001) and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia (2002). He established as important stylist, a writer of wit and sensibility. As a dramatist, he was ranked just behind Arthur Miller (2002).

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