I was visiting a friend of mine at the McDowell colony, a writers' retreat in New Hampshire, oddly enough. Thorton was there visiting, and I knew who he was. I'd carried about a small volume of my poetry with me wherever I went. I was making the terrible mistake of being a poet in those days. I was in my early 20s, and hadn't written plays yet. I'd written two terrible novels, but I knew I wasn't a novelist. I still thought I was a poet. I ran into Thorton Wilder and I handed him a bunch of my poems and said, My name is Edward Albee, read these. And he's a very nice man. And so the next day, he said, I read these plays, these poems, rather, I want to take you out and get you drunk. Well, you know what I thought? I thought that my poetry had undergone a sea change since when I was 18, and I'd shown it to to W. H. Auden, and he didn't think much of it. I thought it was gotten so glorious now that Thorton Wilde couldn't discuss it sober. We had to be drunk for him to talk about it.
That wasn't it. He just wanted to have some bourbon, and I didn't mind either. So we sat by a tiny lakelet in the New Hampshire countryside at sunset with this bottle of bourbon. And as the sun was setting and as the level of the bottle of bourbon kept setting, he would discuss each poem of mine. And then gently, I think intentionally, set at a float on the surface of the pond. And when he read about 20 or 30 of my poems, he said, I've read all these poems, Albee. He didn't call me Edward until later. I've read all these poems, Albee. I said, Yes, I see them. There they are all floating. He said, I've read all these poems, pause, have you ever thought about writing plays? Now, I don't think he saw the incipient playwright in my poetry. I think he was trying to save poetry from me. And suggesting something else. And I was reading this volume of the letters, and he gave great praise to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?". He'd read that or seen that. And he didn't like the "Zoo Story" very much for some reason. He thought it was too old-fashioned. Two guys meeting on a park bench in Central Park. I don't remember any plays like that before, but he thought it was too old-fashioned. Anyway, he set me in the right direction.

Jo Reed: Edward Albee, can you tell me the first time you saw "Our Town?"

Edward Albee: I remember the experience. And I was both moved and devastated, and amused and all the good things that a play is meant to do to you. And I have seen since so many dreadful productions of "Our Town", that one of the things I want to talk about today is will somebody please do "Our Town" properly?

Jo Reed: And what would that mean?

Edward Albee: It is not a Christmas card. It- it is not - a cute play. And most of the people who produce that play think it's afternoon television. It's one of the toughest, saddest, most brutal plays that I've ever come across. And it is so beautiful, and when it is funny, it's gloriously funny. And I, there are times. There- there are scenes in "Our Town", that it's hard for me to think about without wanting to cry. It's- it's that beautiful a play .

Jo Reed: Why do you think "Our Town" is seen as this nostalgic look at small town America at the turn of the century?

Edward Albee: Well, I guess that Thornton should have written something or said something about how the play is meant to be done. A lot of times, if- if- if there's something there that can be seen as something less than it is, which is- which would be less troubling to people, that's the way they'll want to see it. No two people see the same play, and you can't stop people from seeing what they want to see in spite of what the play is all about. And Thornton Wilder knew his Kierkegaard. He knew his Camus. He knew his Sartre. He knew all of the, the existentialists, even though the play was written before existentialism. But it's a highly existentialist play, going back from Kierkegaard.

Jo Reed: I'm thinking about the lack of staging of the play. And how Thornton Wilder really calls the audience to imagine the play as much as the play is being performed. And what that contributes to the play, which I think is a great deal. But also do you think that can account for sort of the misplaying of it?

Edward Albee: I suppose if you give directors and actors the opportunity to do something wrong they're likely to take it. I can't imagine any other justification for so many terrible productions of "Our Town." It is a highly avant-garde play in the sense of of it's construction, and- and it's- it's methodology. Maybe that gets in the way of people understanding. I don't know.

Jo Reed: And we also have a stage manager who throughout the play keeps telling the audience that they're seeing a play.

Edward Albee: Yes. He's trying to keep them intellectually on their feet. Yes. Maybe Thornton should have done something, made- made- made a couple of notes. Say this is a tough play, you know. Stop sitting around pretending it's a Christmas card.

Jo Reed: He, of course, had won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for "The Bridge of San Luis Rey." Do you have any idea why he turned to the theater?

Edward Albee: To broaden his perspective, to broaden himself probably. Uh.. Well, he was so knowledgeable in plays going back to the Greeks. He- he knew his theatrical history uh.. uh.. as well as anybody. Fact, sometimes it was dangerous to talk to Thornton because you made so many mistakes, and he kept correcting you. Escalus did not write that one, Edward. Yeah. Hey, you're right, Thornton. I guess he saw things that he could do on stage that he couldn't do on the page, and he certainly found them. You know, he wrote a lot of plays. And- and I think "Our Town" is a masterpiece. I think "Our Town" is probably the finest American play ever written so far. I think "The Skin of Our Teeth" is a damn good play. The- the others I find somewhat lesser and- and don't matter much. But "Our Town" is- is- is so extraordinary and spectacular.

Jo Reed: What do you think it is about "Our Town" specifically that makes it the greatest American play?

Edward Albee: The fact that uh.. when it is done properly it makes us understand that if we don't live our lives fully and completely, we've wasted everything we have.

Jo Reed: But doesn't it also say it's impossible to do that?

Edward Albee: Yeah. But you got to try hard.

Jo Reed: That I agree with. You know, what strikes me about Thornton Wilder is he's certainly interested in the big questions, and yet the specificity of both the way "Our Town" begins...

Edward Albee: Yeah. But it's so nice that "Our Town" just doesn't say, hey, this is a play about the big questions.

Jo Reed: Exactly.

Edward Albee: The fact that he makes it seem other than it is makes it seem, well, it is about these people in- in- in this small town, and their lives, which- which are not spectacular, and that they live their lives and then they die. And that's it. You know, for me, the most imp- the- the scene I can hardly even talk about without crying, is when Emily's dead, and she comes back and they warn her, "Just take the most normal day of your life. Don't take anything spectacular. Don't- don't take- don't take your wedding or- or- or- or- or- or when you went to the soda fountain and he asked you to marry him. Don't- don't do anything like that. Just take a normal day." Happened to be her sixteenth birthday, fifteenth or sixteenth birthday.

Jo Reed: Twelfth.

Edward Albee: Twelfth? That young! I'm getting that old! I think she was older. And she comes back home and of course they can't see her, where she is ever, and she watches their lives going on and all of a sudden, from off stage, we hear her father say,"Where is my girl; where is my birthday girl?" And she breaks up. And I almost did, telling you aboiut it. And she has to leave - it's too beautiful, too sad. A writer who can do things like that, breath taking moment. Something that Wilder has in almost all of his plays. Something that catches us and makes us understand that we are seeing something maybe far different than we thought we were. So that's the moment in "Our Town" where she realizesd it's time; she can't relive it; it's all gone.

Jo Reed: There is something about the dead sitting in chairs facing the audience that seems to me such a mirror, such a reflection on the audience.

Edward Albee: I'm sure he intended that, of course. Yes, certainly. One of the things that Wilder accomplished is by taking people who were not spectacular, accepting the fact that they are human being, most normal people you could possibly imagine. No greatness there, no terrible things, you know. One guy was a rdunk,, there's a ..., absolutely normal people. And they are all so extraordinary and all their lives are so extraordinary.

Jo Reed: He seems to be both a very honest observer of people and also an immenselely generous one.

Edward Albee: Yes, but can you be an accurate observer of People withoiut being both generous and objective? I don't think you can. There has to be seom generosity or you are writing an act of aggression, and that is not enough.

Jo Reed: Has your viewing or reading of "Our Town"changed throughout the years?

Edward Albee: I don't think it has, because as I say I keep running into those awful productions of it and I keep the same ... that's not the way to do it. You are making a terrible mistake, you are ... your audience to what this play is about. Now I make the assumption that I'm correct about "Our Town"; everybody else is wrong. So I've talked to a lot of people who I think really, really know what the play is about. And they realize, it's a tough play.

Jo Reed: Can you talk just briefly about the diffence bewteen sentiment of emotion, which "Out Town" ceertainly has and sentimentality which productions often drift into.

Edward Albee: Excatly, Wilder keeps us at a kind of breath dealing distance in this play. He doesn't permit us to slough over into sentimentality, that we are objectively waching that which moves us and that which affects the people in the play. The fact there is the double image going there.

Jo Reed: Let's say yoiu had to persuade somebody to go and see "Our Town." What would you say to them?

Edward Albee: I would say what I say to most people, especially to my students, "Every time you go see a play, see the first play you have ever seen. Make sure you bring no expectation or no limitation of what theater should be into the theater. Have your first theatrical experience every time you go."

Jo Reed: Edward Albee, thank you so much.

Edward Albee: My pleasure.

Reneé Montagne: The work of America's greatest playwrights include "Death of a Salesman", focusing on a father and his son, a mother-daughter relationship in "The Glass Menagerie", and the ultimate battle of the sexes between a failed professor, George, and his drunken wife, Martha. That last play "Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf?" is easily Edward Albee's most famous. Interestingly, among the plays that have brought Albee three Pulitzer Prizes and three Tony Awards, none of them are about gay issues, which accounts for a bit of a controversy he got into a little over a week ago. The playwright was recognized as a pioneer at the Lambda Literary Awards in New York, organized to honor gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender writers. In his acceptance speech, Albee said he was a writer who happened to be gay, not a gay writer, and he went on to say.

EdwarAlbee: Any definition which is going to limit us is unfortunate and goes beyond that and is deplorable.

Reneé Montagne: Although he's expressed that view as far back as the sixties, his suggestion that writing solely about gay themes is a lesser form of literature raised hackles at the Lambda ceremony and within the larger gay community. We wondered if Albee was surprised by that reaction and we reached him in New York.
Good morning. Thank you for joining us.

Edward Albee: Good Morning.

Reneé Montagne: When you're speaking such as you were the other evening at the Lambda event, you were being honored as a pioneer. It was the Pioneer Award, which would make you, I guess, a pioneer gay writer, right? Which is partly what sparked a debate.

Edward Albee: Well, they're not going to call the award pioneer for a writer who happens to be gay. Maybe I'm just being a little troublesome about this, but so many writers who are gay are expected to behave like gay writers, and I find that is such a limitation and such a prejudicial thing that I fight against it whenever I can. You know - what 5% of the people in the United States are gay or lesbian? Does that mean that they can only write about gay subjects because they happen to be gay? Should men only write about men? Should women only write about women? Should Blacks only write about Blacks? Should Whites only write about Whites? All of that is preposterous nonsense. The whole function of being a creative artist is to transcend the self and the self-interest and have something to do with the anguish of us all.

Reneé Montagne: Although it's not invalid, right. To in fact do that sort of writing.

Edward Albee: The only valid thing about it is the prejudice that the majority community brings to all of these definitions.

Reneé Montagne: Meaning that the majority community sees it as a specialized and lesser piece.

Edward Albee: Yeah. I mean, I happen to mention the fact that whenever poor Tennessee Williams is referred to in a review these days, or in conversation either as gay playwright, Tennessee Williams, nobody ever says straight playwright Arthur Miller. And interestingly enough, Tennessee who happened to be gay, wrote much more convincingly about women than Arthur Miller ever did, who was famous for his own point of view for being straight.

Reneé Montagne: Though, when you speak of it being limiting, even from the point of view of the majority population, a number of other gay writers took issue with that.

Edward Albee: Yes, a number of gay writers would, because some gay writers make their careers and their incomes off of being gay writers rather than writers who happen to be gay.

Reneé Montagne: But you still would hold to that. That's a big issue.

Edward Albee: I don't think it should be an issue. I mean, who goes around talking about the abstract expressionist painters and making a definition or a distinction between those of them that were straight and those of them who were or are gay? Nobody does it. Nobody does it with composers. People only do it with writers, and I find that so ridiculous.

Reneé Montagne: Was there ever a moment when you wanted to write, expand on say, a gay character and felt at all inhibited from doing that?

Edward Albee: I have spent my life fighting for the civil rights of all people I can find who need their civil rights stood for, and this includes so many people, Blacks, Asians, homosexuals, all kinds of people whose civil rights are being trampled upon. And it's our responsibility to do this, to be able to try to get a society that doesn't have these prejudices anymore. But I'm not going to limit the subjects that I write about to the lives of 5% of the population. I'm not going to do it because that cuts me off from the woes and problems of 95% of the population. Why should I do that?

Reneé Montagne: There was a time when gay themes were just not on. It certainly took a lot of courage to be open about one's sexuality early in the game. I'd say the fifties and sixties. In that period, and you had one of the most famous plays ever in American theater and this is "Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf."

Edward Albee: And you know that when that play came out, some critics knew I was gay, and they wrote in their reviews that he's probably writing about two gay couples.

Reneé Montagne: Really?

Edward Albee: Isn't that extraordinary?

Reneé Montagne: Yes.

Edward Albee: Because I know the difference between men and women, and I know the college structure, and that wouldn't have been allowed in college in those days.

Reneé Montagne: So what are you working on now?

Edward Albee: I'm writing a play. Well, I'm writing a play and I don't want even talk about what involves, and it involves a lot of our social prejudices about a lot of things. None of which, oddly enough happens to concern being gay. But I do not begin to play with a thesis and I must now write about this or that subject. I discover that I'm thinking about some people and I try to find out why I've been thinking about them, and the whole play evolves from people that I'm thinking about whom I have invented. I mean, I invented them, therefore they exist and therefore I can put them down on paper.

Reneé Montagne: Edward Albee, thank you very much for joining us.

Edward Albee: You're welcome. Thank you.

Reneé Montagne: Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Edward Albee, who last month was honored as a pioneer at the Lambda Literary Awards in New York City. This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Reneé Montagne.