Three Plays by Edward Albee

Description

26 September, 1937, was the day the infamous blues singer Bessie Smith died. This tragic event is the setting for Edward Albee s one-act play that addresses the now-debunked myth that Bessie was refused admittance to a whites-only hospital before she died. The Sandbox is an absurdist play detailing a woman s final moments. Albee s innovative plot sees the actors directly address the audience and acknowledge their roles as performers. The American Dream is the estranged twin of the nuclear family s sins. Or so Albee figuratively depicts in his acerbic take on the most quintessential of US aspirations: examining the crushing falsehood of everything that traditional America, on the cusp of a new decade, took for granted. All three plays first took to Broadway in the early 60s and continue to be performed all over the world. Albee peerlessly explores the controversies of the human experience in a way that undoubtedly makes him one of the greatest contemporary American playwrights.

Edward Albee is an American playwright who has received three Pulitzer Prizes for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women. His early works were heavily influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd: a movement closely associated with surrealism and existentialism. Other notable works include Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, The American Dream and The Goat or Who is Sylvia? His latest play, At Home At The Zoo, was published in 2009.

One of the few great living American dramatists * The New York Times * [Albee] is rightly recognized as one of the key figures in twentieth-century American drama, a peer of Eugene O Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Sam Shepard and a dramatist of exemplary courage, ambition, and resilience * The New York Review of Books *