PASSION PLAYS.(Edward Albee)(Biography)

Never trust a man who loves animals. First, ask him why he loves them. If he says that he loves them because they are artless and innocent, or incapable of duplicity, or because of the wholehearted unselfishness of their affection, or because their souls are not tainted by envy, or something like that, beware. It is likely that that man is of two minds about humans.

Edward Albee, the most important living American playwright, loves animals. He stops and chats with dogs he meets on the street. He likes to visit children's zoos where he can sit with animals close up and talk to them and play with them. He has always kept pets--chiefly cats and Irish wolfhounds. He claims that "Black Beauty" is one of his favorite movies. James Thurber, who wrote intimately about animals, is one of his favorite writers; another is A. A. Milne. "What do I love about 'Winnie-the-Pooh' and 'The House at Pooh Corner'?" Albee muses (a love from which, take note, he excludes Christopher Robin). "I think that these people have not been destroyed by anything. The purity of them. The fact that they're always going to be that way, and nice. They're forever good."

The animals that appear in Albee's plays are not forever good. They are not adorable or fluffy. But they have the animal quality of being thoroughly themselves. They are what they are, and humans feint and scheme around them. Albee's first play, which opened in 1959, a one-act called "The Zoo Story," centers on a narrative about a vicious dog and a man who tries to win him over, then tries to kill him, and then, having failed at both, resigns himself to a wary and cold detente. In Albee's 1966 play "A Delicate Balance," Tobias confesses that he had a pet cat killed at the vet's because it had started to dislike him. A character in the 1993 play "Fragments" relates how she decided to enlarge by several feet the grave she had dug for her dead dog because he had been frozen at the vet's and his tail was sticking straight out and she didn't want to snap it off (this actually happened to Albee and his late Irish wolfhound Harry).

Albee is perhaps the only playwright to write two leading roles for lizards. And it is no accident that it was he who came up with the brilliant idea to write a play about a man who has fallen in love with a goat. "I've never seen such an expression," Martin, the hero of his 2002 play "The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?," says of his caprine beloved. "It was pure . . . and trusting and . . . and innocent; so . . . so guileless." The poet and translator Richard Howard, who has known Albee since he was in his twenties, once wrote a poem about Albee and himself in which the Albee figure is named Feral. Albee's plays tend to cherish, in both their animal and their human protagonists, childlike, creaturely, feral qualities--authenticity, impulsiveness, imagination, openness to unconscious thoughts. Woe betide any character who displays adult human virtues such as rationality, courtesy, prudence, or restraint.

The play that made Albee famous, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," which opened in 1962 and is being revived on Broadway this month, is a carnival of wit in which George, a defeated middle-aged history professor, and his bitter, thwarted wife, Martha, use a young couple as foils for the dazzling cruelties they practice upon each other. Right from the start, the language is dense, complex, and spoken very fast; the cruelty is breathtaking, as is the amount of alcohol the characters consume; and all of this, combined with the play's length (nearly three hours) and the fact that it never leaves the living room, produces a claustrophobia so intense as to be nearly unbearable. There is no relief, no light entry, no gentle fade-out--it is all second act. Whereas George and Martha are brutal and abandoned and, we are meant to see, truly in love, the young couple, an ambitious biology professor named Nick and his idiot wife, Honey, hold their marriage together with protective lies: Nick pretends to Honey that he loves her; Honey pretends to Nick that it is just bad luck that they have not yet had children. It is a measure of Albee's allegiance to feral behavior and feral people that, at the end of the long, harrowing night, it is George and Martha's marriage that is left standing.

Shortly before "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" was due to open in Boston, in February, Albee attended a rehearsal in New York. The rehearsal was to take place in a large room divided by tall screens; the front part of the space was set up as a sketchily furnished living room. Albee showed up early, but Elizabeth McCann, one of the play's producers, hadn't arrived by the time the rehearsal was to start, and this made Albee peevish. "There is no reason for anyone to ever be late," he muttered. He sat down on a metal folding chair and looked about. He splayed his fingers into an arch, fingertip to fingertip. He played with his mustache. He got up, walked over to the refreshment table, and helped himself to a cup of coffee and a couple of butter cookies.

Albee is slightly built and tends to stoop. He walks slowly, tipping forward, his hands hanging down. He is not graceful, but he is sure of himself. His hair is no longer heroically shaggy, as it was in the seventies and eighties, but it is unkempt enough to make his mustache look casual. His face is nearly always arranged in a neutral expression--the focussed blank of either irony or testiness.