| In spite of constant experimentation in form, Edward Albee has changed very little, over the years, the basic ideas of his original plays. He urges the rejection of false securities posing as control in favor of the risky openness that makes possible connection among people, including the creative intersection of artist, art, and audience.; A typical Albee play has characters whose lives are fundamentally chaotic and isolated. They try to get control by the illusions of dead language, dead custom, and withdrawal from or manipulation of other characters. When characters use language to manipulate rather than to reveal, they let a misapplied concern for control undermine the value of connection. At the same time, the self-conscious articulations of such characters provide a backdrop for the less calculated, more powerful revelations of their comparatively inarticulate associates, or even of themselves in their less guarded moments.; Albee is most powerful when dramatizing characters who discard crippling illusions in favor of conscious fictions. Thus they exert artistic control over the metaphors that shape their perceptions and govern their behavior.; Albee demands of himself and of his audience the same artistic control that his most appealing characters aim for. Through non-illusory techniques he reminds spectators that they are in a deliberately ordered artificial environment and invites collaboration in the process of replacing the negative power of illusion with the conscious control of art.; Although Albee's characters talk about the need to establish connections with other characters, his talents are less apparent in the dramatization of love than in the dramatization of loathing and other elaborate defenses against intimacy. When his highly self-conscious characters, accustomed to directing the dramas of their lives with articulate cruelty, step in front of the spotlight as actors, they become linked in compassion with those whose actions they have guided. In such moments of connection, Albee's drama is most compelling and significant. |
