The Collected Plays, Vol. 3: 1978-2003

The Collected Plays #3

by Edward Albee

Included are some of Albee s most iconoclastic and influential plays, including his adaptation of Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita; The Man Who Had Three Arms, an indictment of the abuse of critical power; three shorter plays, Finding the Sun, Marriage Play, and Fragments, all hailed as triumphs of innovative dramaturgy; Occupant, a touching homage to, and a striking portrait of, Albee's longtime friend, the sculptor Louise Nevelson; as well as The Play About the Baby, Knock! Knock! Who s There!, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia, a trilogy of plays that brought Albee the kind of critical and popular acclaim he enjoyed early in his career after years of neglect by the theater establishment.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction

656 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1982

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

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read The Marriage Play, The Play About The Baby again, Occupant (fantastic), Knock, Knock, Who's There, Fractions, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? again, I loved Occupant and Fractions, though I fear that is not the title.

[Marc Maris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Met als favoriete teksten 'Finding the Sun' en 'Marriage Play'.

[Emma Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Also read for work. The Occupant is a fictionalized, posthumous visitation from Nevelson. A lot of the dialogue is pulled straight from Dawns + Dusks, which made me feel like my research was truly thorough! I enjoyed. It felt very early 2000s straight play, the lessons fall a little flatter on the page than in the other work but it was enjoyable and I can imagine the costuming for a production of this being really lush and startling.

[Alan Teasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have only read Three Tall Women from this volume (for a class).

[John Matthew IV · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in one setting.

It is a very different play but well-written and entertaining.