Tributes: Edward Albee

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—Edward Albee's 2002 tour-de-force play exploring the outer limits of love, fidelity, morality and tolerance—where the emotional crisis at the center of the narrative boils over into such catastrophic levels of heartache and rage and such Greek-tragedy levels of destruction and retribution that the first time I saw it—and the second time and the third time and the fourth time—the audience collectively gasped to the point of almost screaming and then sat rigidly and almost palpably silent until well after the final stage light had extinguished and the last emotionally drained actor had silently moved into position for the company bow.

It's one of my two favorite—if there even exists a favorite-not favorite continuum of cataclysmic emotional destruction—moments in modern theater ... the other being the last three seconds of David Mamet's Oleanna before the stage becomes abruptly, dreadfully dark.

Though he's largely a genre unto himself, it's difficult to pigeonhole Edward Albee as a playwright. He wrote or adapted about 30 works that embodied movements like Theatre of the Absurd and brought popular works of narrative fiction like The Ballad of the Sad Café and Breakfast at Tiffany's to the stage and screen.

My favorite Albee works—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (embodied in this movie still by the incrementally calculated Richard Burton and desperately braying Elizabeth Taylor playing the American-experiment patriarch and matriarch George and Martha [the latter of whom the script deliciously describes as "large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger"]), The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—all share the format of four characters on stage interacting to varying degrees with one character who may or may not exist offstage. It's an intriguing conceit, and one that keeps bringing me back to these three plays for my own contemplation. In an odd double standard, though, I can't stand reading them; the characters for me seem to be clumsy and dry with no meaningful depth on the page, but they grant a glorious latitude for actors to make fascinating choices as they flesh them out.

Today is the seventh anniversary of Edward Albee's death. I'm not one to be sad when famous people I've never met pass away—and having seen only seven of his works (that I can remember) I'm certainly no slavish Albee devotee—but I'm profoundly thankful for the emotional roller coasters he's put me on in various theaters over the years ... and for the body of work he's left that I can continue to explore in my own way in my own time.

I have a couple favorite quotes from these works that I'd love to mention here in closing, but they're all potential spoilers. So I'll just lift a glass of bergen to his memory.

The end of innocence

22 years ago this morning I ran a little late and got caught in the rush-hour crowds that prevented me from getting a seat on my EL train. But as I stood there—a relatively new Chicagoan—I was still in awe of the fact that I actually lived in Chicago and rode a train to work and I reveled in the fact that I was one of THEM: my fellow Chicagoans packed in the train car with me, commuting to (or from) our jobs as waiters, insurance brokers, construction workers, actuaries, janitors, bankers, personal trainers, writers, and every other career and purpose in our big, always-moving city.

When I finally arrived at work and got off the elevator, I saw everyone in my office crowded around the TVs in our glass-walled conference room. My first thought was that my colleagues would see I was late. But after joining them—both in front of the TVs and in shared abject horror—and watching the towers burn and fall, seeing the gaping wound in the Pentagon, learning of the disappearance of an entire airplane and its passengers in a fiery pit, I was struck by the fact that my underground commute that morning with my fellow train riders—a microcosm of the city, if not the country—was our last collective moment of innocence before we had access to any news and we suddenly had to face the sickening, horrifying, misanthropic enormity wrought by other human beings on a scale none of us could have ever imagined.

22 years ago today I never felt closer to colleagues, friends, family members and even strangers as we worked to understand the hatred and comprehend the savagery of perhaps the ugliest tragedy in our lifetimes.

22 years ago today we lost a certainty in our collective safety but we gained a powerful strength in our ability to care for and protect and even love each other when we needed to ... and even when we didn't.

22 years ago today, our world changed immeasurably. Our hearts broke irreparably. Our determination grew mightily. Our humanity spread defiantly. Time may erode the intensity of our initial united magnanimity, but we will never forget.

Happy 182nd birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

Though a proud native son of Czechoslovakia, Dvořák is perhaps best known for his mighty, highly melodic Symphony No. 9, which is most commonly called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote almost the entirety of it in the United States—more specifically in Spillville, Iowa, just 100 miles north of Cedar Rapids.

It's the last symphony he composed, and in my opinion its enduring brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the American folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines, soaring emotions, and confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise.

 
It's a gorgeous, centuries- and continents-spanning legacy ... built on a mere six-note theme he encountered on an 1893 stay in the humble American Midwest.