He did write one of America’s classic plays, of course; but many drama teachers are eager to shake their charges from the shackles of parental upbringing.
I guess that such a prominent playwright wrote such a transgressive play—he’s old and has basically lost his gift to impress otherwise—seemed to give at least one drama teacher such an opening.
Yes, probably. I grew up on the Upper West Side, and while Who’s Afraid, etc., wasn’t set among the Columbia professoriate, it could have been.
However, everything he wrote after that seemed to me to be basically a rehashing of his theme (domestic unhappiness and hypocrisy) which itself was not a whole lot different from earlier post-war fiction such as Man in a Gray Flannel Suit, etc.
Baby boomers are blamed for being cynical and amoral and a million other things, but I really think it was Albee’s generation, paradoxically, the “Greatest Generation,” who gave this message to the Boomer teenagers in the 1960s.
That generation was either very good or very bad. Albee (who is about 85, gay and obviously not particularly supportive of normal male-female human relationships) is obviously one of the latter group.