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The Collected Plays book cover 2
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The Collected Plays
Series · 3 books · 1965-1982

Books in series

The Collected Plays, Vol. 1 book cover
#1

The Collected Plays, Vol. 1

1958-1965

1981

These range from the four brilliant one-act plays with which he exploded on the New York theater scene The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream to his early masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Also included are two adaptations from notable American novels The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm and Albee's mysteriously fascinating Tiny Alice. This book represents one of the most exciting and bold periods in the career of one of America's most popular and imaginative playwrights.
The Collected Plays, Vol. 2 book cover
#2

The Collected Plays, Vol. 2

1966-1977

1965

These range from the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance to the brilliant and complex short plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung to his second Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Seascape, to the scintillating one-act comedy Counting the Ways (recently revived off-Broadway to great acclaim), Everything in the Garden, All Over, Listening, and closing with the controversial Lady from Dubuque (hailed by Time magazine as a major work Albee's best since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ).The volume includes an introduction by Edward Albee, providing new insights into these works.
The Collected Plays, Vol. 3 book cover
#3

The Collected Plays, Vol. 3

1982

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.

Authors

Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Author · 36 books

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."

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