do you like Edward Albee?

The only one I've seen onstage is American Dream, performed by amateur actors in Kalamazoo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/theater/20arts-ABRAHAMANDAL_BRF.html?ex=1345262400&en=a250fcd153a8cf0f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I always had an impossible time reading his plays -- the detailed directions before so many lines make them seem so forced and affected (same thing with Beckett) -- and he seems like such the clever kid and bitter man (though brilliant) in person. But in the past few years I've seen two productions of Seascape, A Delicate Balance staged in an actual Arts-and-Crafts style home, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner's understudy, and now I'm all for him as a great playwright.

albee's one of my very favorite playwrights. i saw woolf at the guthrie years ago and loved it, and saw this: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/20/031020crth_theatre and enjoyed it a lot.

i would kill to see a good performance of 'the play about the baby'

You can see one inspired by 'The Play about the Baby', at least.

Occupant at Signature Theatre 5-6/08

The Linc Center Delicate Balance I saw was with George Grizzard, Rosemary Harris and Elaine Stritch ("I'm not an alcoholic; I'm a drunk").

I've been to the zoo.

But not Kalamazoo.

I think it's hard to keep Zoo Story from seeming dated, the beatnik versus the square in the Dave Brubeck frames.

The Simon and Garfunkel song covers the same subject with much more concision.

oh, zoo story. it seems unfair to hate it for inventing such an obnoxious playwriting cliche but still

i read around 800 scenes, one-acts, and even screenplays about a crazy person freaking out a square at a park during my time in LEARN TO WRITE PLAYS SKOOL

Fight Club kind of improved on Zoo Story.

well it still can work beautifully as a formula but all these kids insisted on SETTING EVERY SCENE ON A PARK BENCHE

"benche" being the european spelling, obv

They weren't Rapaport, were they?

lol

Michael Rapaport?

Is the Albee Square Mall named after him?

Or perhaps one of his illustrious forefathers?

i saw zoo story in edinburgh a couple of weeks ago - it was performed on an actual park bench, in a park!

i like him.

the goat, which i saw in london with jonathan pryce, is fucking amazing.

Which I Saw in London With Jonathan Pryce makes a better subtitle than Or, Who is Sylvia?

i love american dream, death of bessie smith and who's afraid. i dont' know if i've ever seen any of them staged though :(

i saw him in a panel discussion (also included wallace shawn) last year and he was crochety and awesome but i think he's become quite predictable for being so.

also i did the wheat-beige hat monologue once for an opera audition and that monologue is freaking awesome.

George Grizzard, Actor Noted for Albee Roles, Dies at 79
By ROBERT BERKVIST

George Grizzard, a versatile actor who achieved his greatest renown on the stage, playing everything from Shakespeare to Shaw, from Neil Simon to Edward Albee, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 79 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was caused by complications of lung cancer, said his partner, William Tynan, who is Mr. Grizzard’s only survivor.

Mr. Grizzard’s career began in the 1950s and lasted more than 50 years. He had roles in movies and was a familiar face on television. But it was in the theater that he thrived, particularly in Mr. Albee’s plays. He appeared in the original 1962 Broadway production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Mr. Albee’s seething drama of marital strife. More than 30 years later, he won a Tony Award for his performance in a revival of another Albee drama, “A Delicate Balance.”

In both plays he was singled out by critics for his ability to move dexterously from one emotional state to another. Howard Taubman, writing about “Virginia Woolf” in The New York Times, praised Mr. Grizzard’s ability to shift “from geniality to intensity with shattering rightness.” Vincent Canby, reviewing “A Delicate Balance” in 1996, wrote admiringly about the way Mr. Grizzard’s character exploded when cornered.

Mr. Grizzard made his Broadway debut as Paul Newman’s kid brother and fellow convict in “The Desperate Hours” (1955), by Joseph Hayes, in which the jailbreakers invade a home and terrorize the occupants (Karl Malden and Nancy Coleman). By 1959, Mr. Grizzard had received his first Tony nomination, as best featured actor, for his work in “The Disenchanted,” an adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s novel about F. Scott Fitzgerald. It starred Rosemary Harris and Jason Robards Jr.

Three years later, he and Robards appeared together again in “Big Fish, Little Fish,” a comedy by Hugh Wheeler about a successful novelist (Mr. Grizzard) who becomes a magnet for the emotionally needy. Mr. Grizzard came away with his second Tony nomination, again as best featured actor.

It led to another memorable role, in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which caused a sensation when it opened at the Billy Rose Theater in 1962. Directed by Alan Schneider, it starred Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill as the warring spouses, Martha and George, and featured Melinda Dillon and Mr. Grizzard as Honey and Nick, newcomers to Martha and George’s college campus battleground. (The play was later adapted for a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with George Segal as Nick.) In a 1996 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Grizzard spoke of the difficulty of enduring the role of Nick in the play night after night. “That’s the guy Edward wanted destroyed, and he did a pretty good job of doing just that,” he said. “And the audience, every time George and Martha stuck another knife in, they laughed and clapped.”

After only a few months in the production, Mr. Grizzard stunned his associates by announcing that he was leaving to go to Minneapolis. The director Tyrone Guthrie was holding auditions there at his new theater for a modern-dress production of “Hamlet.” Mr. Grizzard, who felt he still had a lot to learn, wanted to try for the part. He got the part and then stayed on at the Guthrie Theater for the next two years, playing the title role in Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” the Dauphin in Shaw’s “St. Joan” and the rascally Mosca in Ben Jonson’s “Volpone.”

George Cooper Grizzard Jr., was born on April 1, 1928, in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., and grew up in Washington. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he worked briefly at a Washington advertising agency, then quit and auditioned successfully at the newly established Arena Stage. He eventually went to New York, where he studied acting with Sanford Meisner before returning to the Arena to earn his Actors Equity card. When he came back to New York in 1955, he made his Broadway debut in “The Desperate Hours.”

His Broadway credits also included “The Country Girl,” a revival of the play by Clifford Odets. When the production moved from the Kennedy Center in Washington to Broadway in 1972, Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, called Mr. Grizzard’s performance as a cocky young theater director “brilliant.”

Mr. Grizzard went on to play the Duke of Windsor in Royce Ryton’s drama “Crown Matrimonial” (1973); a sometime husband in Neil Simon’s “California Suite” (1976); and a mental patient who thinks he’s Einstein in a Kennedy Center revival of Dürrenmatt’s “Physicists” (1982).

His occasional film roles included a bullying United States senator in “Advise and Consent” (1962), based on the novel by Allen Drury; a kindly doctor in “Happy Birthday, Wanda June” (1971), by Kurt Vonnegut, and a Western oilman in “Comes a Horseman” (1978). In 2000, he and Elaine Stritch played a wealthy couple in Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks.”

On television, Mr. Grizzard made regular appearances on series like “Law & Order.” He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance as John Adams in “The Adams Chronicles,” a 13-part historical saga on PBS in 1976, and won an Emmy starring with Henry Fonda in “The Oldest Living Graduate.” That drama, broadcast live on NBC in 1980, was the story of a father-son struggle over property.

In 1996 Mr. Grizzard finally took home the Tony Award that had eluded him for so many years, winning as best actor in a play for his performance in the restaging of Mr. Albee’s scathing 1966 drama “A Delicate Balance,” a portrait of family conflict and suburban malaise. Mr. Grizzard was a standout in a cast that included Rosemary Harris, Ms. Stritch and Mary Beth Hurt. Mr. Grizzard also shone in “Seascape” (2005), another Albee revival, in which he and Frances Sternhagen played a long-married couple whose beachgoing idyll is interrupted by the arrival of two inquisitive amphibians.

And in 2006, Mr. Grizzard, playing a successful fashion designer who becomes a gay activist, held his own against Christine Baranski’s scintillating socialite in Paul Rudnick’s “Regrets Only.”

In interviews, Mr. Grizzard spoke frankly of the ups and downs of the acting life, the rich, meaty roles and the interminable runs in bad plays. But his pull to acting was there practically from the start. “I was an only child, and probably very lonely,” he said in a 1985 interview with The Times, “so I made up children to play with — Gene and Bounds and Mrs. Pig and Mrs. Hog and their children and a town called Scottina. It was all a child’s fantasy, but I guess that just kind of developed into wanting to create people."

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times

The delish Dan Callahan on WAoVW?, genesis, stage and film:

http://altscreen.com/05/17/2011/whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf-liz-taylor-richard-burton-edward-albee/

I was house/cat-sitting for friends with HBO last winter and saw this HBO on demand series called Masterclass, 30-min documentaries about master artists meeting with high school kids and talking craft. The Albee one is really good, and shows him in a better light than most interviews and speeches: basically, Albee (the man) is much more tolerable once you realize it's like he's being Johnny Cochran to his art (and anyone's work) rather than just being a dick. In that doc, he's really good with these high-school kids, taking them to his Soho loft, talking shop, dealing frankly with the students' writing without being a classic Albee dick about it.

Steppenwolf's recent production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, is coming to Broadway this fall.

I saw about Steppenwolf... Didn't go to the one w/ Kathleen Turner & Bill Irwin. Wish I had seen Nichols & May in that brief run Callahan mentions 30 years ago!

Steppenwolf's recent production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, is coming to Broadway this fall

Now it's THIS fall, allegedly.

I think it's hard to keep Zoo Story from seeming dated, the beatnik versus the square in the Dave Brubeck frames.

― Eazy, Thursday, September 6, 2007 8:04 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Simon and Garfunkel song covers the same subject with much more concision.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, September 6, 2007 8:06 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a moment

well I finally saw the Steppenwolf production of Va Woolf, and am pleased enough to dismiss the 'half-price' sticker shock ($72).

Tracy Letts was esp good I thought, I forgive him for the movie of Killer Joe.

http://37.media.tumblr.com/10d43e5a71b1e81cc04c0ea4b280da73/tumblr_n0qbkgBppl1qzdzwdo1_500.jpg

previews word is great on imminent B'way revival of Three Tall Women

(Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf, Alison Pill)

tickets going fast for 3TT -- i'm in the last row upstairs in 2 weeks

omg would severely violate moral code to see that

dint know ya had one :D

Her jaw thrust forward like a prow, her elfin eyes belying her regal bearing, her wide-screen mouth wrapping itself around those slashing, implacable consonants — they’re all exactly as you remember them and want them to be. Or if you’ve never experienced them, welcome to the pleasure. Either way, Glenda Jackson is back; even better, she’s back in a role that’s big enough to need her.

Aptly, the name of the role is A.

A is the oldest of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which opened on Thursday night in a torrentially exciting production that also stars Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill. It not only puts an exclamation point on Ms. Jackson’s long-shelved acting career but also serves as a fitting memorial, which is to say a hilarious and horrifying one, to Albee, who died in 2016.

Though “Three Tall Women” won him his third Pulitzer Prize, in 1994, and marked his return from the critical wilderness after two decades of disrepute, this is the play’s Broadway premiere. Joe Mantello’s chic, devastating staging at the Golden Theater was worth the wait.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/theater/review-three-tall-women-glenda-jackson-albee.html

lives up to billing! i don't think i knew what the conceptual twist midway was.

i do agree that the supreme moment of life is Death.