The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee: (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Edward Albee, perhaps best known for his acclaimed and infamous 1960s drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is one of America's greatest living playwrights. Now in his seventies, he is still writing challenging, award-winning dramas. This collection of essays on Albee, which includes contributions from the leading commentators on Albee's work, brings fresh critical insights to bear by exploring the full scope of the playwright's career, from his 1959 breakthrough with The Zoo Story to his recent Broadway success, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002). The contributors include scholars of both theatre and English literature, and the essays thus consider the plays both as literary texts and as performed drama. The collection considers a number of Albee's lesser-known and neglected works, provides a comprehensive introduction and overview, and includes an exclusive, original interview with Mr Albee, on topics spanning his whole career.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgements; Notes on the text; Chronology; 1. Introduction: the man who had three lives Stephen Bottoms; 2. Albee's early one-act plays: 'A new American playwright from whom much is to be expected' Philip C. Kolin; 3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: toward the marrow Matthew Roudané; 4. 'Withered age and stale custom': marriage, diminution, and sex in Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance, and Finding the Sun John M. Clum; 5. Albee's 3 1/2: the Pulitzer plays Thomas P. Adler; 6. Albee's threnodies: Box-Mao-Box, All Over, The Lady from Dubuque, and Three Tall Women Brenda Murphy; 7. Minding the play: thought and feeling in Albee's 'hermetic' works Gerry McCarthy; 8. Albee's monster children: adaptations and confrontations Stephen Bottoms; 9. 'Better alert than numb': Albee since the eighties Christopher Bigsby; 10. Albee stages Marriage Play: cascading action, audience taste, and dramatic paradox Rakesh H. Solomon; 11. 'Playing the cloud circuit': Albee's vaudeville show Linda Ben-Zvi; 12. Albee's The Goat: rethinking tragedy for the 21st century J. Ellen Gainor; 13. 'Words; words … They're such a pleasure' (An Afterword) Ruby Cohn; 14. Borrowed time: an interview with Edward Albee Stephen Bottoms; Notes on further reading; Select bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Stephen Bottoms is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies and Director of the Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds. He is the author of The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge, 1998), Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Cambridge, 2000), and Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement. He has also edited Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, and has published articles on a wide variety of topics in a number of scholarly journals. In 2004 his article 'The Efficacy-Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy' (Theatre Topics, September 2003), was nominated for the ATHE prize.

Review :
'… highly recommended for all libraries acquiring materials on literature and the theatre in English.' Reference Reviews