E-Mail This Article to a Friend The state of the arts Edward Albee speaks at Emerson, Broadway in Boston imports some Irish flavor, and more

Albee expounds

Edward Albee was in town last week, and, 75 years be damned, he hasn’t mellowed. As part of a stint as 2004 Emerson College Visiting Artist, the three-time Pulitzer-winning dramatist gave a lecture to a full house at the Cutler Majestic Theatre titled "The State of Theater and the Arts in America" in which he made it clear that he does not think much of either. Neither does he suffer even the faintest slight. Responding to Dean of the School of the Arts Grafton Nunes’s detailed, praise-steeped introduction, which referred to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as Albee’s first full-length work, the playwright observed that Nunes had made only one mistake. "All of my plays are full-length," he opined, "no matter how long they are."

After a droll and sanguine account of his personal history (Albee was adopted in infancy by the wealthy scion of the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit and his wife; the latter is indicted and forgiven in the Pulitzer-winning Three Tall Women), the playwright recalled the 1950s as an "enchanting time" in Greenwich Village, with Abstract Expressionism and Off Off Broadway starting to percolate. He talked about going to Berlin in 1959 to see his first produced play, The Zoo Story, performed in German (on a bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape that was soon repeated at New York’s Provincetown Playhouse). And he explained why he is, and can’t help being, a playwright. He enjoys it for two reasons, he said. The first is that "I do it rather well." The second is that he enjoys "that at its best a play is an act of aggression against the status quo."

All playwriting, Albee went on, is "basically corrective" — and, he made it clear, the audience ought to accept correction more gracefully. The purpose of art, he said, is to be "disturbing, not pacifying." It is a problem in this country, he continued, that "the audience feels it has a right to determine the nature of the art being made for their benefit." There is no relationship between "the truths creative artists want to put out and what the public is willing to hear." The theatergoer, "the person for whom the trouble is taken," is part of the problem. And don’t look for Albee — whose most recent success, the Tony-winning The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, includes bestiality among its family values — to write with an eye toward commercial appeal. That would make him "a servant," an "employee" — something he has chosen not to be since quitting his job as a deliverer of Western Union telegrams in 1959.

Albee is discouraged by more than just the state of the arts in America — which, he says, "may be a society on its way downhill without having reached its zenith." But art is his bailiwick and, he believes, what separates us from the beasts. "Somewhere along the line," he says of evolution, "our tails fell off and we grew art." He’s still growing it: on May 20, Hartford Stage will present the world premiere of his newest play, Homelife. It’s a prequel to The Zoo Story, with which it shares the bill. It runs through June 20; for ticket information, call (860) 527-5151 or visit www.hartfordstage.org

Synge along

Broadway in Boston, which last fall teamed with the Huntington Theatre Company to bring us Sir Peter Hall’s elegant production of As You Like It, recently announced its latest gift to the literate. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre of Ireland, the organization that manages the Colonial and Wilbur Theatres as well as the Charles Playhouse will import the Abbey’s production of John Millington Synge’s masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, to the Wilbur Theatre next November as part of a four-city American tour. Synge’s lyrical, dark-comic account of a young man who snatches fame in County Mayo by claiming to have murdered his father caused riots when it debuted at the Abbey in 1907. Calmer behavior is expected at the Wilbur when the production, guided by the Abbey’s artistic director, Ben Barnes, plays the Wilbur November 2 through 28.

For those wishing to be first in the ticket line, Broadway in Boston is offering "an exclusive fall preview package for the upcoming 2004-2005 season" that also includes The Lion King (opening at the newly renovated Opera House July 16) and Evita, which comes to the Colonial Theatre November 2 through 14. For more information, contact the Broadway in Boston subscription and member program at (617) 880-2400 or visit www.broadwayinboston.com

Summer nights

For those forward-thinking enough to wonder what they’ll be doing next July besides sitting on the Esplanade with Keith Lockhart, three major Berkshires theaters have recently announced their 2004 summer fare. The Williamstown Theatre Festival turns 50 this season, which it kicks off June 24 with a Mainstage evocation of its venerable late-night cabarets. The evening is directed by Christopher Ashley and features a full band and a rotating roster of entertainers including Lewis Black and Bill Irwin. That’s followed by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (July 14 through 25), directed by Huntington Theatre Company honcho Nicholas Martin; Noël Coward’s Design for Living (July 28 through August 8), directed by Gregory Boyd and featuring Campbell Scott and Steven Weber; and The Cherry Orchard (August 11 through 22), helmed by Rent director Michael Greif.

More experimental and exciting is the fare scheduled for WTF’s intimate Nikos Stage, which includes world premieres by a quartet of big-gun playwrights. Theresa (Bad Dates) Rebeck’s The Water’s Edge (June 23 through July 4) is about a man who returns to his estranged family after 17 years; it’s directed by Will Frears and features Kate Burton. That’s followed by Richard (James Joyce’s The Dead) Nelson’s Rodney’s Wife, which is set in Rome in 1962 (July 7 through 18); Michael John (The Wild Party) LaChiusa’s R Shomon, a musical suggested by the short stories of Ryonsuke Akutagawa, and directed by Ted Sperling, with Tony winner Audra McDonald in the cast (July 21 through August 1); and Terrence McNally’s Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams, which is about a couple’s love affair with the theater and is directed by Scott Ellis (August 11 through 22). Tickets go on sale June 15 at the Williamstown box office; call (413) 597-3400.

Down the road in Lenox, Shakespeare & Company combines Shakespearean comedy with more recent literary lights in what it calls "a season of mad love." In the troupe’s Founders’ Theatre, Eleanor Holdridge directs the Bard’s Forest of Arden–set comedy, As You Like It, which launches the season June 18 and plays in repertory through August 29. The Comedy of Errors, directed by Cecil MacKinnon, shares the Founders’ rep August 4 through September 2 and is joined by a "studio production" of Othello September 3 through 5. Meanwhile, at the parlor theater in the Spring Lawn Mansion, Holdridge’s production of Peter (Amadeus) Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage, reprised from last fall, goes up July 2 and plays in rep through September 5. S&C artistic director Tina Packer, no slouch as an actor, portrays the passionate if eccentric Lettice Douffet, a guide at a musty London manor house whose tours are sparked more by imagination than by dull fact. Beginning July 8, Boston actress Annette Miller will reprise her recent Nora Theatre Company turn as "sultana of style" Diana Vreeland in Mark Hampton & Mary Louise Wilson’s Full Gallop. Fall (September 24 through October 24) brings to Spring Lawn a reprise of Dan McCleary’s solid production of Eileen Atkins’s Vita & Virginia, in which Tod Randolph and Catherine Taylor-Williams repeat their performances as Bloomsbury intimates Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Tickets go on sale March 29; call (413) 637-3353.

In Stockbridge, close by Alice’s Restaurant, the Berkshire Theatre Festival also has plans. The Mainstage season gets underway June 22 through July 10 with Pearl Cleage’s Harlem Renaissance–set romance Blues for an Alabama Sky. That’s followed by Anders Cato’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (July 13 through 25); a revival of octogenarian Stockbridge resident William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (July 27 through August 14); and Cato’s staging of Molière’s The Misanthrope, in Richard Wilbur’s translation (August 17 through September 4). In the smaller Unicorn Theatre, Jared Coseglia helms Adam Guettel’s musical about a doomed spelunker, Floyd Collins, June 9 through July 3. Eric Hill directs the world premiere of Herman Hesse’s SIDDHARTHA, a Jungian Fantasy, which he adapted from Hesse’s novel, July 7 through 31. Scott Schwartz helms Kathy Levin Shapiro’s Eugene’s Home, which is about a cerebral-palsy victim discovering romance, August 4 through 21. And actor/mime Bill Bowers performs his one-man show It Goes Without Saying, a memoir of his trip from Montana to Broadway, August 24 through September 4. From March 15 through June 1, call (866) 811-4111 for tickets; after June 1, call (413) 298-5576.