Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of March 12th
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It is the 71st day of the year, leaving 294 days remaining in 2022.
On this day in 1928, the playwright Edward Albee was born.
Albee was one of the most honored story tellers of his generation, whose inspired tales of existential angst played out on the stage. Fittingly, his first one-act play, The Zoo Story, premiered in 1959 in Berlin, along with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
Both playwrights were classified as practicioners of the Theater of the Absurd, which focuses on the ideas of existentialism and what happens when human existence lacks meaning and communication breaks down. They often have bare or limited sets on stage.
The Zoo Story shows an increasingly menacing stranger questioning a man reading a newspaper in Central Park. When the play moved to New York, it helped showcase the idea of Off-Broadway theaters and productions.
Albee's work won six Tony Awards for Best Play (include three years in a row in 1963-1965), one Tony for best author, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He also won three Pulitzer prizes for drama. A fourth play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?, was selected by the drama panel in 1963, but the vote was overturned, and the overall committee did not award the drama prize that year.
Still, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woole? is Albee's best known play, and it is generally recognized as his masterpiece. In addition to the stage production, which won a Tony and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play, it was adapted into a 1966 film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, which won five Ocars.
It concerns the complex marriage of an upper middle-class couple, George and Martha. It takes place in their home, where they have invited a younger professional couple. The two couples engage in a night of heavy drinking, which is filled with malicious games, insults, humiliations, betrayals, and painful but revealing confrontations.
The plays shows Albee's interest in the themes of reality and illusion. The title of the play is taken from the Disney tune Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad, Wolf because, Albee said, he is asking the question, "Who is afraid of living life without false illusions?"
Albee, who wrote or adapted 30 plays, died in 2016 at his home in Montauk, N.Y.
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