Malcom The Play

by Edward Albee

Long out of print, James Purdy's novel Malcolm, first published in 1959, established Purdy as "one of the greatest writers produced in America during the past hundred years" (Dame Edith Sitwell). Malcolm is the bizarre story of an innocent young man of 'exceptional beauty' who becomes involved in a series of comic and poignant adventures. Taken under the wing of a famous astrologer, an undertaker, a billionaire, a midget painter, a jazz queen, America's foremost chanteuse, and a tattoo artist, among others, Malcolm is led endlessly from protector to protector in search of his missing father, until the journey itself becomes his undoing.

Genres: Plays, Fiction, Drama

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.

People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.

Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deliciously wacky! I want to see a David Lynch directed film version of this.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did you ever wonder why ‘Mulan’ or ‘The Green Zone’ or ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ bombed at the box office notwithstanding the fact that they were in fact great books? Well, each movie had a different reason for flopping. Now, ‘Malcolm’ was a stage adaptation of James Purdy’s novel of the same name. And Albee capriciously rehabilitated key plot-points. Hell, he chucked off essential characters from out of his script. Estel Blanc was done away with. The exhaustively popular jazz musician George Leeds was censored. No wonder the play proved a commercial letdown. And I very painstakingly read up-until the last line after which I remember having read ‘Tintin in America’ to optimize my mood. That was me in 2013. I was a fool.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a good adaptation of the novel by James Purdy.
Most of the dialogues are already in the novel, Albee in theses cases wrote the context.
Albee's use of language and Purdy's are very close, and the beauty of the play's language lies in how the most famous playwright translated Purdy's dialogues for the stage and how he linked the scenes of the two-acts play and summarized what he did not put on the stage from the novel.
I wonder what it might have been like on stage...