Edward Albee on George Grizzard

[Music] this is theater talk i'm susan haskins and here to introduce our very special guest is my co-host michael riedel of the new york post uh we're great great fans of the playwright edward albee and this coming season in new york you're going to have a lot of great plays of his to choose from coming up at second stage very soon is a play called peter and jerry it's running now it's running now yes um which is uh the second act is the zoo story the play that began edward's career and the first act is a new play he's written called home life which is sort of the setup to the zoo story uh later on this fall you're going to see me myself and i at the mccarter theater that we hope will be transferring to new york at some point there is a revival of the american dream and sandbox at the cherry lane that edward will be directing and in the spring uh occupant to play of his about his friend louise nevelson that was supposed to have been seen in new york a few years ago with ann bancroft uh but edward is bringing that back now and we're happy that all these shows are here and we're delighted that he himself edward albee is our guest tonight on theater talk there's one thing we ought to straighten up right now yes somebody's going to get the crazy idea or the depressing idea that since i'm having a birthday this year but somehow i set up all these productions as a self-celebration so i mean it's nice to turn 80 you know better than not being able to yes but i didn't have anything to do with any of these productions it's all wonderful accident that it's happening so it wasn't it wasn't a con job or anything i want to talk about peter and jerry but i want to begin actually with the zoo story okay the play that um began your career really uh you were just telling me you wrote it and i think i remember from reading in mel gusso's biography of you uh 238 west 4th street fourth street where you lived in the village at the time with seven or eight of my closest friends oh really was it this tiny little apartment you know sleep fast we need the beds you were 30 years old mm-hmm well no i was 28 actually you're 28 when you okay it was produced when you were 30 30 right so you were 28 years old and there's a very good chapter in mel's book about your life in in greenwich village and being around artists it was such an exciting time yeah i i left home i was an adopted kid and hated my adoptive family and the whole environment though they did give me a very good education and so i left home when i legally could when i was 18. i got disowned disinherited and you know pretty much broke but i moved to new york that huge distance between larchmont and new york city 20 miles it's a million miles and i moved straight to greenwich village and i lived there for uh the 10 years until i wrote the zoo story and then afterwards having the most wonderful time of my life everybody talks about you know the difficult period it wasn't difficult i was getting to see all the most wonderful theater imaginable we were seeing beckett and brecht and pirandello and everybody it was wonderful and the abstract expressionist painters were painting that was new and all the new music was called up to columbia and we go up there for the concerts nothing cost anything everybody sat around and liked everybody had a wonderful time that's how describes you as a very quiet and retiring young man i was there to learn a lot that you were just taking it in and people were then surprised when you turned out to be so articulate that you had so much to say because you were so so quiet well if you sit around for 10 years you learn a few things and then i suppose you feel you can open your mouth well i was curious but did you lack confidence in those days to speak up or was i didn't think in terms of confidence i was a fairly shy kid yeah that's what i mean but there was so much fascinating going on all over the village and all of the arts and so many interesting people to learn stuff from so i just sat around and absorbed a great deal of stuff i was i was learning all the time now you were a poet correct oh i started off as a poet and failed at that and i failed as a novelist and i failed as a short story writer i failed as an essayist but you're not really failing you're learning how to write though but within you were you going i'm going to tell you something someday i don't remember well here's what i hear hey just here's something that um mel says that i found quite interesting he says was edward a writer or simply an observer destined to play a secondary role in other people's lives increasingly there was a feeling of emptiness and perhaps the idea that he would become another creator who never lived up to his potential as edward himself said several years later he was fed up with everything including myself is that a fair assessment at that point i haven't written anything that was worthwhile i mean i i've always been pretty good at knowing whether stuff is good or bad myself or other people's and i knew all the poetry and the and the novels and the short stories and the essays were crap i knew that they weren't any good but i knew that i wanted to be a writer and so i wrote the zoo story and i thought you know this is somewhat better and you wrote the zoo story in two weeks is that correct probably three at the kitchen two and a half two and a half i i had stolen or liberated as i call it a big typewriter from the western union company where you work there i was delivering telegrams i loved that how i ever got it up those stairs i don't know back back to the apartment where we were all living and i wrote the zoo story there in about two and a half weeks yeah and it just seemed to pour out and the interesting thing was i knew when i finished that play that this was different this was something that wasn't bad this had some merit and i was always objective about my work and i knew the other stuff wasn't any good but this was so for our viewers who aren't familiar with the zoo's story who would that be well it's not a lawyer what would you tell us that the zoo story is about what happens in the desert that's about an hour but how about you've used that what is it about it so i'd say it's an encounter because it is about a man who looks for a publishing house reading in new york central park back in the days when it wasn't worth your life to be sitting in central park a man who has got a placid well-organized well-ordered life is accosted by a man named jerry who is exactly the opposite of him who engages peter in under trying to understand this guy's life refuses it pretends he doesn't understand which drives this guy jerry to violence and ends up with peter unintentionally killing the stranger jerry yeah still still a power powerful enterprise and end of second actress and and why why did it catch on so why was it why was it so successful do you believe why was this a breakthrough for for you for me it was right for me because it was the first halfway decent thing i'd ever written right but why was it accepted as well as it was well i had a pretty good companion piece on the bill with that it was called crap's last tape by saying that oh you're too bothered which two which mr beckett brought you through well some of the reviews like to the beckett play a lot more than mine some of the others like my play a lot more than the beck could play but uh this is a pretty healthy time off broadway it was just really beginning to get going and and here was uh a master like beckett and a young playwright who apparently had written a play that amounted to something and it was a pretty good combo and we ran for almost three years i wanted to get into home life in a second but i was just curious when you said that the two radically different people peter lives a very comfortable middle class life not really engaging in his own life in some ways no of course and jerry who is ferociously engaged to the point of destruction in some ways in his life um you're going to be a critic i'm stealing all from mel but mel said that in in some ways as he was analyzing this play that there were the two edward albies there was the edward albee of larchmont of privilege and as you said earlier the edward albee who went a million miles away and became the edward albee of the greenwich village is that a fair assessment of the biographical detail of this play uh fairly fair but not totally if even as good a biographer as mel then he was a really good one an honest fair guy most biographers make a terrible mistake in assuming that the only place that creativity comes from is from the experience of the writer which is such a ridiculous mistake uh i am not peter i am not jerry i've never put myself in any of my plays i invent i invent characters the limits to what i invent are my own perceptions what i'm able to to understand i think he was writing about what created your perceptions uh okay but he didn't make that point clear he did say one thing i thought was interesting um though because i'm just interested in the specifics of how play comes together that your work as the delivery boy for western union especially delivering telegrams definitely for sure was quite influential in some ways in your perspective i met an awful lot of very very interesting people during those three years or so that i was delivering telegrams all the moments of their in crisis in their lives yeah and most of us on the on the the then not so fashionable upper west side of new york city you know central park western riverside drive were okay but in those days in in in the 50s there was a mess in between i believe jerry lives up in a rooming house in that area it did yes of course about 76th street i think so so the people you met delivering the telegrams float around in your mind but i've always kept my eyes and ears open you know i'm going to get assaulted on the subway someday i take the subway everywhere it's the only place to get anywhere in new york city and i'm always looking at people and listening to them people are fascinating you know now when you wrote the zoo story you then sent it off to thornton wilder no no no thornton wilder read my poetry before and told me to write plays right which was perceptive of him i think he was just trying to save poetry from me though i don't think he really meant to write plays he could have said anything no i sent it to um i only knew composers in those days basically i didn't know many writers and one of the composers i sent the play to was david diamond who just died last year alas a very good american composer who was living in italy at the time and uh david read the play and liked it a lot and he sent it to a friend of his a swiss german actor translator named pinkus brown who happened to be married to the daughter of the people who owned had gotten back after the nazis were overthrown a jewish family fisher who'd gotten back their publishing house the s fisher publishing house and he sent it to pinkus brown david did who translated it and sent it to stephanie hunzinger who was my agent until she died a couple of years ago everybody's dying yeah exactly and she arranged for a production of my play the zoo story on a double bill with beckett's play craps last tape in german in berlin in berlin at the schiller theater of eckstadt yeah and so that's how the player managed to get his world premiere in berlin and i had to go of course and you were on your way why after all these years have you gone back to the play to write um act one because i'm convinced that i had already written act one but i'd never put it down on paper i thought the zoo story worked pretty well but i also thought you know this is really a little one-sided peter doesn't have much to say in this play he's sort of a backboard that jerry bounces all of his ideas across maybe i didn't flesh out peter enough and that kept bothering me just a little bit and finally about six or seven years ago it occurred to me well why don't you fix it why don't you try to write a first act peter at home with his wife ann before he goes to the park let's learn more about peter what's the interesting thing is i still knew who peter was i hadn't thought about him for 30 40 years and i also knew who his wife ann was even though i'd never written a word for her and i could i wrote home life in two weeks because i still knew who these people were i still i knew their relationship i'd retained it all these years and so it wasn't like adding a new piece to an older play it was like doing the first part of an older player did you do it on the liberated western union no i still write i write by longhand now you do it's called manuscript yes yeah not on a computer no god no somebody told me once a long time ago that maybe this is no longer true with computers somebody told me a long time ago that if you put something on a computer and you press the wrong buttons the whole thing will erase i don't want that no um the american dream and sandbox at cherrylang you're directing those plays i've done that before yes i know you've directed uh i think you've directed most of your most of your works uh is the best director of edward albee edward aldi no the the director that gives for the first time around the most accurate representation of what was going on in the author's mind when he wrote the plays is me yes yeah i can do that so whenever i direct a play of mine i can be very accurate to my intention whether that's the best intention of the world or not it was what i intended and every once in a while i like to see that have you direct you've directed the american dream before other places oh yeah sure and sandbox both people have have written that the american dream and the sandbox are you looking at your own family uh and a young man's bringing forward his very privileged family and his and the problems well certainly both of those played both of those players which are satires uh are are a portrait of my adoptive family the mother and father whom i did not enjoy living with and my maternal grandmother who i thought was a lot of fun she was a hoot i liked her a lot sure but that didn't come out of me that came out of them do you still relate to these characters the same way so many years later oh sure you have to of course there's been no evolution in your in your no i mean i wouldn't rewrite it a play 40 years after i wrote it because i'm not the same person but then you came back to like the writing about your adopted mother three women well that was a real life portrait ah i see so but not not the satire of no no that was him i mean is there a difference between you know writing about your family when you're young and the sort of the anger there and then writing about your family when you're older and a more deeper understanding of why they behave the way they behave well uh when i got to writing um three tall women the anger about my adoptive mother was still there but i'd added something a little pity yeah so in a way then there was an evolution yeah so i wouldn't call it a softening called maybe a groin um me myself and i about identical twins yeah among other things among other things yeah um i don't know what the damn play is about yet it's finished though right sure all ready to go um any uh how do you hit on the idea of identical twins well it's interesting um there are identical twins in the american dream that boy who shows up is the identical twin of the first kid they adopted and and destroyed psychologically so there's an ident they're identical twins there isn't that interesting that is what do you make of that uh i didn't even think about that when i was writing me myself and i because i was after a different purpose a different function of identical twins the whole matter of being able to create your own identity and the the extra question and problem of creating your own identity if you were two people who are the same interesting so that's it's more about that than than anything to do with the uh uh identical quality that permeated the american dream how do you think your mind first went on to thinking about twins why were you thinking about twins in the first place in the american dream yeah i don't remember right it's a very long time i mean we ask you it's funny because we ask you to analyze in this way yourself which is very odd because most great great writers don't put themselves forward in this way that you're sitting here and and then we're saying we're we're trying to i can theorize with the best you can theorize but did the theorizings of your plays ever get in the way of your writing no no because every play i write i i've i've familiarized myself throughout my life with with theatrical literature i i know the whole literature of theater and i'm aware of the fact that i've written what how many how many plays have i written now i don't know 28 or something like that 29 30 30 with this one probably but every time i sit down to write a play i write the first play i've ever written ah and i also try to write the first play that anybody's ever written and so i completely ignore everything that i know and go with with whatever one that particular thing needs and wants to be but that's a tremendous skill to be able to put yourself in that kind of new place you have to or else you're you're writing thesis many writers lose that ability sure i mean i i mean how do you how are you able is there a technique you use that you're just able to to sit down and clean your mind in this way and and and come to it new i don't know how it happens and since uh creativity's black magic it's probably best not examination yeah it strikes me though that the the characters are so powerful in the play i mean is that where you begin with with a voice with a guy i begin with characters and find out who they are and then if i know who they are really know who they are then i can trust them to be in the play and i started writing the play but now with occupant about louise nevelson who was you were very close to i believe um that's a different matter yeah i mean the same as three-fold women your mother and that's biography and when you when you're when you when you wrote an occupant were you was this a kind of attempt to understand this friend of yours or she was such a powerful personality it wasn't an attempt to understand it i understood her before i wrote the play or i wouldn't couldn't have written the play but it was a she was just a vibrant character that you wanted she was a fascinating fascinating woman the complexity of her life the biography is so fascinating and the louise nevilson that she created the eminent sculptor right this this this this object that she created for the for the world to see i was interested in in in an audience seeing what what caused that and what was underneath it and the difference between the the presented louise nelson and the real louise nevelson that fascinated me of course i waited until after louise died before i wrote it so she wouldn't hit me this then again becomes another question as you said with the identical twins of identity of creating i mean one she decides she's she's really this but she's going to become something yeah that seems to be something that afflicts a lot of my players isn't that yeah yeah it doesn't affect you i mean is there the is there the uh is there the uh private editor albie and the public edward albee no i i with mel's book there is no private it would all be left [Laughter] it's true and so that is a wonderful book and i get this it's a good book because i there is no nothing hidden about my about my life i've never thought seen anything in my life that other people shouldn't know about if they wanted to know about it and so and mel uh a first-rate critic yeah first-rate critic good mind and a nice guy and we were good friends if you know i knew it sooner or later somebody was going to come along and write a biography about me that sort of thing happens if you stick around long enough you know and uh let's get a good one in there first before anybody can do anything else yeah uh george grizzard wonderful actor who was the original nick and who's afraid of junior wolf died a couple of weeks ago i'm very fortunate having george in three of my plays delicate balance um seascape and seascape yeah and virginia woolf um i read though in alan schneider's memoir that you were reluctant to have george play nick originally because you thought nick should be more strapping football i remember it differently i remember being quite taken with uh uh with george's abilities he was he was a young guy he was what 28 30 when the proper age when he played nick i remember all i remember but i don't remember saying to alan though i may have is he large enough for the role but i remember george coming up to me saying do you think i'm too small for the role and i remember saying something you know rehearsed and clever like any actor can be any size they want to be and don't worry about it so but probably a little truth both there maybe maybe it did concern me that i that i had conceived of nick more of a bruiser but once george got into rehearsal and i saw the subtlety yeah which he played and then the aggressiveness that he could do so cleverly i had no problem with having george in the play at all i'm sorry he had to leave so soon yet he left after three months i think subtle is a good way to describe george that's the sense i always got watching him there's never any flashy actory kind of tricks i've never seen any better playing uh tobias in a delicate balance he was so wonderful in that yeah i always thought he had that the upper class elegance of your characters but also the kind of anger and emptiness or or the lost quality about him that well he was a first-rate actor he could play a lot of things he could play more than one thing i want to ask you a little one last thing though about backstage i always heard that he and elaine stritch were at war with each other during a delicate balance was that true uh yes how about was that a george and martha situation i can't quote some of the things that george would say to stretch during curtain calls because this is a family program right all right edward albeit it's always a great pleasure having you on theater talk don't miss peter and jerry now at second stage me myself and i at the mccarter theater in princeton in january in january with a possible new york transfer in the world so for the spring the american dream and uh sandbox at the cherry lane which you're directing april and april and occupant at this march whichever it is the march yes you know four plays together not not bad for uh not bad for uh an 80 year old well as long as it's not for that as long as they're going to stop next year i hope not as long as you don't stop uh edward thanks a lot for being our guest tell us a little bit about the character you're playing i mean how do you see him and how do you approach him i see him like a a a judge that i knew when i was a little boy from north carolina who was our congressman and uh he was a small town judge and he went to congress and he got my father an appointment to the government in uh in washington and that's how i grew up in washington and uh he's a small town moral wily southerner and and i you know i throw in a lot of curly cues of my own but that's kind of who i have in mind how do you find the play uh hits an audience now i tell you my favorite sound in the theater is dead silence and we get that a lot that means they're they're listening one of the things the play brings up and i think your character struggles with is the notion of um of a victor's justice i mean he doesn't come to nuremberg the great moral crusader that he becomes at the end he seems to me to have a little bit une of unease that the victor's imposing our way of looking at the world our justice system on to these nazi judges do you agree with that do you see your character struggling with that in the play i hate anything that tampers with natural ignorance i don't uh i think this there's right and wrong and i think this man knows that and uh he tries his best to give everybody a fair shake and he tries to know the people he wants to know you know the german people that i meet in the play or he's really anxious to know what they're about and what went on in this country and then it gets down to right and wrong murder and life and it's simple it's very simplistic for me you see i don't i don't i don't read the books about this period i don't read about the courtroom things you don't read the legal arguments no not at all no it has it's a moral issue with me and that's what that's what i deal with george finds all kinds of overtones that i didn't even know were in the plight i have no idea what he means but now but your genius our thanks to the friends of theater talk for their significant contribution to this theater talk is made possible in part by the frederick lowe foundation the eleanor naylor dana charitable trust the alan s gordon foundation the corey and bob denelli charitable fund carrie j freeze the dorothy strelsen foundation the new york city department of cultural affairs and the new york state council on the arts a state agency playbill online is the official website of theater talk and the home of the playbill club providing information and opportunities for theater live [Music] we welcome your questions or comments for theater talk thank you and good night

Channel: Theater Talk Archive

Views: 1,029

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: theater talk, susan haskins, michael riedel, broadway, EDWARD ALBEE, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, GEORGE GRIZZARD, PLAYWRIGHT

Id: tHlaeLHtmaU

Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020