On The Brechtian Alienation Effect In Albee's Plays

Edward Albee is one of America's foremost dramatists and the leading American figure in the Theatre of the Absurd.Albee's best plays rank among the finest in contemporary theatre.Albee is famous for his off-Broadway experiments.And he is good at the juxtaposition of various elements in his plays.Alienation effect is a term created by Bertolt Brecht,the famous German playwright.It aims to make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in his approach to the incident.The author of this paper finds that in many of Edward Albee's plays,alienation is frequently used,and many of Albee's opinions are similar to Brecht's-one of the playwrights he likes best.Both of the two playwrights emphasize on sport,advocate theatre's social function and have realized the audiences' blindness when watching a play.In Albee's plays many Brechtian techniques to create alienation effect are used. Firstly,he makes special requirements on acting such as direct addressing to the audience. And the actors are expected to be in a state of self-alienation,that is the actor must invest what he has to show with a definite gest of showing.Secondly,he uses symbols which are surrealistic to create alienation effect.Together with a waking lighting,Albee creates a theatre which is quite close to what is called by Brecht as a smoker's theatre.Thirdly, Albee breaks the convention of using music to foil the situation.Instead,he makes the audiences aware that music was used in an artificial way.What's more,just like Brecht, Albee laid much anticipation on the audience.He is quite unsatisfied with the critic-lead sheep-like audience,and expects that the audience understand the plays in a more profound and independent way.Besides the techniques inherits from Brecht,Albee never stops making his own experiments.In many of his later works,new techniques are used to create alienation effect.Instances are the weirdness of plot,and counterpoint,to name just a few.The two masters show genius in their dramatic works.And their choice of using alienation effect is significant.Alienation effect can strip the event of its self-evident, familiar,obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them. It also helps to historicize the incidents and sublimate the play's lasting meaning.The frequent occurrence of alienation effect in Albee-a popular modern American playwright's plays,is not a coincidence.This phenomenon reveals that alienation effect is full of vitality and being added more significance,thus developing constantly.We believe that alienation effect will have more work than ever to do worldwide in the 0twenty-first century theatre.