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• 1 media/THE-RELEVANT-QUEER-Dramatist-Theatrical-Producer-Edward-Albee-Born-March-12-1928.-www.imageamplified.com-Image-Amplified4.jpg media/s-l400.jpeg 2021-04-30T16:15:56+00:00 Edward Albee, Monologues, and Practice 16 Object 3 Submission plain 2021-05-13T04:11:27+00:00

  By Faith Monahan

  Edward Albee was an American playwright known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1994). He attended Trinity College in Hartford, CT, but he was expelled for skipping classes and refusing to attend compulsory chapel (Boehm). In this interview, a panel of four students in high school and college sit down with Edward Albee to discuss theatre in 1965. They also take questions from an audience comprised of students as well. The episode focuses on the question, “Is American Theatre really in a vacuum?” Edward Albee expresses his thoughts on educating oneself in theatrical arts:

  There are two phases for really knowing about the theatre. One is what you do at home primarily is to educate yourself as much as you can to what’s been going on in the theatre from Sophocles on up to the present, reading plays, and then the most exciting theatre to see fortunately is the least expensive, the work that is being done off Broadway and in the café theatres, the work of very young playwrights.  

  Reading this transcript brought to mind conversations I have heard about theatre in the present. It surprised me how the thoughts expressed almost 60 years ago align with much of my own today. In one of our readings for the InterArts program, an author made the comparison that theatre is to film as prose is to poetry. Because of the limitations of theatre, the medium may never capture naturalism as a film can. In that limitation, however, theatre can take on new meanings.  

  In the past year, I have read and watched a great deal of theatre due to the confines of the pandemic. I have to thank a teacher I had during quarantine last year, Mr. Grimm, who provided me with many plays to read and performances to watch. I still carry some contemporary favorites with me such as Indecent and It’s True, It’s True, It’s True. This term, I am taking Shakespeare as a Philosophy taught by Professor Dan Lloyd, and I reconnected with the tragedy King Lear.  

  As I read more plays during the pandemic, I also started writing poetry. Performing monologues on a zoom camera gets old quickly. I have wanted to try playwriting, but I find it to be intimidating. This project challenged me to put words not just on paper, but then to take them off of the paper once again. In attempts to write spoken lines in the past, I found myself getting caught up in how people should speak. I always felt like writing provided me the space to put down what I cannot say. I see it as an opportunity to take real, isolated moments and feelings, but to mangle them together into a hypothetical web that can connect them. I would ask myself in previous attempts to write a monologue what do people say? In this project, I tried to transform that question into what do I want to say? In this attempt at monologue-writing for the transformation prompt, I am hoping to add a third phase to my education of theatre on top of the two that Edward Albee advises: practice.

  
  Bibliography  

  Interview, 1966, Box: 2, Folder: 1.The Dorothy Gordon Youth Forum, Edward Albee Collection. Watkinson Library Manuscripts. http://localhost:8081/repositories/3/archival_objects/3113. Accessed April 24, 2021.
  
  Boehm, Mike. "Edward Albee, three-time Pulitzer-winning playwright and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' author, dies at 88." Los Angeles Times, 17 Sept.  2016, www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-edward-albee-obit-20160916-snap-story.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2021.