Counting the Ways/Listening

by Edward Albee

COUNTING THE WAYS. In a series of blackout sketches, "He" and "She" probe into the nature of their love for one another. Long married, but aware that time has wrought changes in their relationship, the two spar and thrust at each other in exchanges and reminiscences which are sometimes lighthearted, sometimes poignant, sometimes almost brutal. In the end a mosaic of experience is constructed, illuminating the nature of human love and pointing up the gathering indifference that can beset those who have been perhaps too long and too closely aligned in the sharing of years.

LISTENING. Constructed with the precision of a musical composition, and described by Clive Barnes as "a chamber opera and a symbolic poem about communication," the play juxtaposes three characters "The Man," "The Woman," and "The Girl" and sifts through the tangled relationship they have evidently shared. The Man is amiable but distant; The Woman acerbic and bitter; The Girl is perhaps mad a catatonic who has destroyed her own child. Elliptical in form and redolent with evocative overtones, the play weaves together its strands of conversation and soliloquy into a meaningful pattern of events underscoring the inescapable fact that while we may listen we do not always hear, and our lives, for better or worse, are shaped accordingly.

Genres: Plays, Drama

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

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

[Meemsi · Rating 4 out of 5]

LISTENING

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Listening’ is principally concerned with mental disease and penitence. The characters are a man and a woman (both about 50 years old), a reedy but attractive girl about 25, and a recorded voice. None of the characters has any precise name.

‘Counting the Ways’, in 21 scenes, deals with the theme of how one verifies (or refuses to verify) another’s love.

Both plays are enormously forgettable. When my 40+ self looks back at my 20+ self’s reading choices, he laughs and sheds tears of regret in chorus.

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

The rewards of committing to a completist romp through a particular author/playwright can be immensely rewarding, exposing you to overlooked/underappreciated works you would have otherwise never encountered. And then sometimes you get these two pieces, both fairly sexual, both fairly inscrutable, both supposedly originally starring Angela Lansbury. Oh well.