Albee on his background:
He said that he began writing poetry when he was eight and never got good at it. He wrote two novels as a teenager that he said, "I like to think that these are the worst novels a teenager cold have written." He also tried his hand at the short story. He wrote a first line which he thinks os w wonderful line. It was, "Everything in Rome is uphill." He then said that, unfortunately, everything after that in the story went downhill.
Mr. Albee told us that he had written a sex farce at thirteen which his adopted mother had thrown away. He called her, "my first critic." About his ineffectiveness in writing the poem he said:
"My knowledge of farce was academic; my knowledge of sex, singular."
He told us, and I had not known this before, that "Zoo Story," his first sucessful play, had its world premier in Berlin and it was performed in German. He went to Germany to see it and, though he couldn't even understand it, he watched the audience react and knew that he was a playwrite.
About the power of theatre in society he said:
Theatre is and always has been an active aggression against the status quo...If
you don't like what you see, change.
And further:
In a democracy, we can have anything we want but, in a democracy, we get exactly
what we deserve.
I have very few answers about anything, but I have a great many questions about
many things.
Creativity is merely the need to do something about the experience
And this is my favorite 1) because it's great and 2) because Edward Albee autographed the page of my notes on which it is written:
I like to go to universities because there are young people there, and I
like to corrupt the young.
