True Existence

If there is an enduring theme to Edward Albee’s plays, it is the need to strip away illusions and live consciously. A three-time Pulitzer winner, Albee devotes his decades-long writing career to picturing the emptiness of the modern man, to dramatizing the alienated lonely existence of the individual and his struggle to make some meaning of this human condition, as well as to inviting his leading characters to live honestly both in their inner and outer worlds. His contribution to American theater makes him widely recognized today as America’s greatest living playwright. And he is given the respect and serious attention that have previously been reserved only for Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.By1950, when the Western world had stepped into the advanced industrial age, the levels of anxiety and feelings of alienation were also at all-time high. Against this background, young Albee made his voice heard by producing The Zoo Story as a gift for his thirtieth birthday and got a sensational success first in Europe and then in America. In the specifics of Jerry and Peter’s confrontation Albee explores the agony of human alienation in a consumerist, capitalist culture and the danger of living with illusory complacency. Peter, at the end of the play, has been/is liberated from his false assumptions and is beginning to finally purge his illusions. Communication is not impossible in Albee’s world. For Albee communication shatters alienation and strips illusion off to the bone of its reality. The possibility that the individual can communicate honestly with the self and the other undoubtedly lays bare Albee’s humanism and optimism for regeneration and reconstruction of a new model of community and citizenship.If The Zoo Story can be said as Albee’s first gun-shot at the world of American consumerism, The American Dream is an all-out war. As Albee’s second big success, The American Dream launched another attack on the void, sterilized life characterizing American middle-class who takes appearance for reality. In this play the sense of innocence implicit in the myth of the American Dream collapses, and in its place insatiable material gratification and distorted values take hold to the extreme. At the very end of the drama, when everything seems to have been wrapped up nicely for Mommy and Daddy, we are amazed at Albee’s penetrating satire of the emptiness of American life, the hollowness of its deceptive illusion of satisfaction. With The American Dream Albee’s apprenticeship can be considered to have completed. In October1962, Albee’s first full-length play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was performed. It unquestionably certified Albee’s place in American literature, making him "as the man singled out to take on the burden formerly carried on by O’Neill, Miller and Williams"5(Bigsby,1975,5).In Choudhuri’s view "Virginia Woolf may well be viewed as an extension of the exploration of the myth of the American Dream taken up in The American Dream."6(133) In the play Martha’s father, the absent Other, is always the judge who sets societal standards of success and acts as mirrors by which other characters’identities are reflected. Unable to measure up to the standard, George and Martha play a game of having a son, who is the American Dream of Success. Jean-Paul Sartre once states that "Hell is the Others." The self, one becomes through one’s experience of the Other’s gaze is a self that escapes himself and exists for the Other. By destroying their son-myth at the end of the play, the couple suggests a definitive change to accept their life without illusion. Virginia Woolf dramatizes with full sympathy the existential dilemma in its most painful human immediacy, successfully fulfilling Albee’s attempt to penetrate beneath the appearance of modern society to get down to "the bone... the marrow".7 Though illusion is a theme running through Albee’s work, from A Delicate Balance on, this theme moves from launching frontal assaults on destructive social customs to becoming more subtle scrutinies of the secret personal fears and perplexities in the hope of unveiling the private side of the predicament of human existence. For modern men, personal fear and loss in some ways prevent them from participating in life fully and honestly. Seeking comfort, they sustain their lives with illusions of escape. In A Delicate Balance, Albee makes his heroes confront their fears, during the process of which, they learn about their limits and accept their existential situations as the only reality there is. Though the moment Harry and Edna leave with their intangible "Terror", Tobias and Agnes probably seem to be reverting to their previously ordered balance of life, in Albee’s view, human dignity and courage are shown in whatever choices they make as long as they are true to their authentic selves.The conflict between illusion and reality many a time takes the form of one between free will and fate. Smilansky states "I have argued that, concerning free will, illusion is the human predicament."8The ways in which people engage in illusion to the effect of exercising their free will leave them with disappointment. This is what character A in Three Tall Women finds about her life. This ninety-two-year-old woman, in the final stage of her life, recognizes the limits and illusory feature of her free will that contributes to the risk and pain of her existence. Authentic life lies in accepting responsibility for the actions motivated by the exercise of free will. In her rejection of illusions, she gains full self-knowledge and finds herself free in its true sense.Life is absurd. We cannot deny its absurdity by fixing some illusory meaning upon it; but we can live it humanly in the face of its absurdity. To Discard illusions and live consciously is all that Albee calls for throughout his works. Examining life, exploring soul, man finds meaning for this meaningless world and thus achieves the real free self. This is also why Albee refuses to label his works "absurd theater". Repetition, no-exit, and meaninglessness are the characteristics of the absurd theater. Albee’s works, on the contrary, is full of life affirmations. The heroes who are distinctively angry in his early productions, who are reluctant in making choices in his middle and who are disappointed when looking back in his late, learn to discard illusions. It can be said that Albee’s canon provides us with a life journey, through which we arrive at a destination of true existence.