HE SAID, SHE SAID.(Counting the Ways)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 20-OCT-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

For many years after the phenomenal success of his magisterial early work, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962), the playwright Edward Albee suffered a critical reversal of fortune. Audiences that had delighted in the arch-anarchy that Albee expressed in his first one-act plays, such as "The Zoo Story" (1960) and "The Death of Bessie Smith" (1961), felt that the author's promise had been more than fulfilled by "Woolf," which was his first full-length play. In it, Albee unveiled a brutal--and brutalizing--deeply verbal, and emotionally deceptive world in which he reinvented Arthur Miller's "realism" and Tennessee Williams's lyricism by taking each a step further. Albee exposed the truth in lies, and the lies we cannot live without.

The first Broadway run of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" ended in 1964, when Albee was thirty-six. In his subsequent plays--brilliant theatrical innovations ranging from "Tiny Alice" (1964) to "The Play About the Baby" (2000)--he delved deeper into the themes he had earlier established as his own: marriage as an illusion that does nothing to dispel one's essential fear, anger, and loneliness; maternal love as a smiling trap that, upon closer inspection, reveals gnashing teeth. Critics began to be...

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