Edward Albee

In Act Two of Edward Albee’s haunting “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’ George turns to one of his late-night guests to warn him, “It gets pretty bouncy around here sometimes.’’ No kidding. In Albee’s ode to dysfunction and codependence, director Diego Arciniegas never lets the audience off the hook. Arciniegas’s choices, and the layered performances he draws from his actors, give the Publick Theatre’s first-rate production, playing at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theatre, a refreshingly unnerving tone.

In Act Two of Edward Albee’s haunting “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’ George turns to one of his late-night guests to warn him, “It gets pretty bouncy around here sometimes.’’ No kidding. In Albee’s ode to dysfunction and codependence, director Diego Arciniegas never lets the audience off the hook. Arciniegas’s choices, and the layered performances he draws from his actors, give the Publick Theatre’s first-rate production, playing at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theatre, a refreshingly unnerving tone.

As theater gods go, Edward Albee is way up there, and yet not infallible. So if he decides that certain material he created - such as the second act of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1975 play "Seascape," about a retired couple who have a curious interspecies encounter with a pair of large lizards while lolling on the beach - deserves to be stashed in a drawer, that impulse should probably be heeded. It was quite a coup for the plucky Zeitgeist Stage Company to secure Albee's permission to resurrect the quashed underwater interlude, which the playwright once dismissed as "too fantastic.

As theater gods go, Edward Albee is way up there, and yet not infallible. So if he decides that certain material he created - such as the second act of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1975 play "Seascape," about a retired couple who have a curious interspecies encounter with a pair of large lizards while lolling on the beach - deserves to be stashed in a drawer, that impulse should probably be heeded. It was quite a coup for the plucky Zeitgeist Stage Company to secure Albee's permission to resurrect the quashed underwater interlude, which the playwright once dismissed as "too fantastic.

NEW YORK - Broadway and screen actor George Grizzard, who won acclaim and a Tony Award for performing in Edward Albee's dramas, died Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center of complications from lung cancer. He was 79. Mr. Grizzard's film roles included a bullying senator in "Advise and Consent" in 1962 and an oilman in "Comes a Horseman" in 1978. On television, he made regular appearances on "Law & Order" and won a best supporting actor Emmy for the 1980 TV movie "The Oldest Living Graduate," which starred Henry Fonda.

Adultery isn't a sin in the fictional Irish town of Baile Breag, says one character, it's a way of life. And it isn't just a way of life in Ronan Noone's "The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Breag," it's a metaphor for lost dreams, dead ends, and broken lives. In the third installment of his Baile trilogy, Noone investigates the thin line between love and hate, elation and despair, innocence and experience, vindictiveness and violence, and lust and love. The local writer's voice continues to grow more powerful and more subtle, and his plays are now one of the highlights of any given...

TISBURY -- It's easy to see why "The Retreat From Moscow" received such mixed reviews when it played on Broadway last year. William Nicholson's writing about a marriage, despite its abundant use of poetry, seems prosaic compared with marriage-on-the-rocks dramas by Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, and Arthur Miller, to name a handful of playwrights who've tackled similar material. I didn't see the New York production, but I can imagine that a big proscenium stage would highlight the Pinter-lite aspects of the play -- namely, the inarticulate sounds that emerge when...

The beastly wait is over. "The Goat" has arrived in Boston, and it is -- pardon the mixed metaphor -- definitely worth crowing about. In fact, the Edward Albee wait is over. Although there have been major commercial productions of his work in Boston and smaller companies have taken their turns at his recent plays, Albee hasn't had a prominent champion in the area since David Wheeler's Theater Company of Boston in the 1970s. Neither the Huntington Theatre Company nor the American Repertory Theatre has ever done a play of Albee's.

PROVIDENCE -- "A Delicate Balance" is a delicate creature. The 1966 play, which won Edward Albee the Pulitzer he should have received for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," depends on our accepting its brittleness and artifice as facts of the characters' lives, not tricks of the dramatist's trade. Albee's suburbanites can -- and must -- teeter on the edge of the abyss, but we have to believe that they got there on their own, without a push from him. Albee's characters often pose this kind of problem.

Watching HBO's surfing drama "John From Cincinnati" is like sitting through a bad play at a tiny experimental theater. The dialogue is loud pretentious nonsense signifying nothing but the creative dangers of mimicking Sam Shepard , Edward Albee , and Samuel Beckett . And the acting is a psychic traffic jam, because the actors don't understand their characters, because their characters are no more than vague symbols of -- what? -- being, nothingness, and the fury of being nothing. And as the actors grimace and squeeze out Existential Rage Against the Machine,...

An old woman, declining toward death, reflects on the pains, pleasures, losses, and surprises that have shaped her life and her character. It's a simple enough premise, but Edward Albee, that old master of memory, invention, and self-presentation, builds on it to create "Three Tall Women," a complex, discomfiting, and almost painfully fascinating multiple portrait. To say much more about the plot, or even the structure, would unravel the finely stitched construction that gives the story both its shape and much of its resonance.

NEW YORK - Broadway and screen actor George Grizzard, who won acclaim and a Tony Award for performing in Edward Albee's dramas, died Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center of complications from lung cancer. He was 79. Mr. Grizzard's film roles included a bullying senator in "Advise and Consent" in 1962 and an oilman in "Comes a Horseman" in 1978. On television, he made regular appearances on "Law & Order" and won a best supporting actor Emmy for the 1980 TV movie "The Oldest Living Graduate," which starred Henry Fonda.

Watching HBO's surfing drama "John From Cincinnati" is like sitting through a bad play at a tiny experimental theater. The dialogue is loud pretentious nonsense signifying nothing but the creative dangers of mimicking Sam Shepard , Edward Albee , and Samuel Beckett . And the acting is a psychic traffic jam, because the actors don't understand their characters, because their characters are no more than vague symbols of -- what? -- being, nothingness, and the fury of being nothing. And as the actors grimace and squeeze out Existential Rage Against the Machine, using the...

PROVIDENCE -- "A Delicate Balance" is a delicate creature. The 1966 play, which won Edward Albee the Pulitzer he should have received for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," depends on our accepting its brittleness and artifice as facts of the characters' lives, not tricks of the dramatist's trade. Albee's suburbanites can -- and must -- teeter on the edge of the abyss, but we have to believe that they got there on their own, without a push from him. Albee's characters often pose this kind of problem.

The beastly wait is over. "The Goat" has arrived in Boston, and it is -- pardon the mixed metaphor -- definitely worth crowing about. In fact, the Edward Albee wait is over. Although there have been major commercial productions of his work in Boston and smaller companies have taken their turns at his recent plays, Albee hasn't had a prominent champion in the area since David Wheeler's Theater Company of Boston in the 1970s. Neither the Huntington Theatre Company nor the American Repertory Theatre has ever done a play of Albee's.

TISBURY -- It's easy to see why "The Retreat From Moscow" received such mixed reviews when it played on Broadway last year. William Nicholson's writing about a marriage, despite its abundant use of poetry, seems prosaic compared with marriage-on-the-rocks dramas by Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, and Arthur Miller, to name a handful of playwrights who've tackled similar material. I didn't see the New York production, but I can imagine that a big proscenium stage would highlight the Pinter-lite aspects of the play -- namely, the inarticulate sounds that...

An old woman, declining toward death, reflects on the pains, pleasures, losses, and surprises that have shaped her life and her character. It's a simple enough premise, but Edward Albee, that old master of memory, invention, and self-presentation, builds on it to create "Three Tall Women," a complex, discomfiting, and almost painfully fascinating multiple portrait. To say much more about the plot, or even the structure, would unravel the finely stitched construction that gives the story both its shape and much of its resonance.

Friends, family, and colleagues of the late David Wheeler turned out for a memorial service at the American Repertory Theater celebrating his life and achievements as a director and as founder of the Theatre Company of Boston. We hear that dozens of collaborators tearfully shared memories and anecdotes, and several of the biggest names in theater and film sent along personal messages including Al Pacino , Matt Damon , Stockard Channing , and playwrights Edward Albee , David Rabe , A.R. Gurney , and Theresa Rebeck . Among the crowd at the ART were...

Adultery isn't a sin in the fictional Irish town of Baile Breag, says one character, it's a way of life. And it isn't just a way of life in Ronan Noone's "The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Breag," it's a metaphor for lost dreams, dead ends, and broken lives. In the third installment of his Baile trilogy, Noone investigates the thin line between love and hate, elation and despair, innocence and experience, vindictiveness and violence, and lust and love. The local writer's voice continues to grow more powerful and more subtle, and his plays are now one of the highlights of any given theater season.