The American Century: Literature since 1945 691What is curious about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the light of Albee’s
subsequent development is the way the play ultimately forces us to see George and
Martha’s immersion in life as strangely heroic. For them, as for the young protagonist
of The Zoo Story, if it resists, if it hurts, it is real. Life, it seems to them and the action
seems to suggest, is painful, unbearably difficult for those committed to living,
rather than evading, it. The passion of that perception, however, a passion that
consequently fires up the story of George and Martha, is precisely what is lacking
from most of Albee’s later work. Many of the later plays explore familiar themes.
Tiny Alice (1964), for example, explores the absurd but inescapable nature of faith,
illusion. A Delicate Balance (1966) dramatizes human defense systems, how social
and family rituals, even argument and aberrant behavior, act as temporary stays
against confusion, a way of shoring up the psyche against dread. Box (1968) and
Quotations from Chairman Mao (1968) dwell on the banality of human relationships
in America. The Lady from Dubuque (1980) presents dying, and the despair
consequent on the knowledge of it, as a necessary adjunct of living. But none of
these plays, not even the critically acclaimed Three Tall Women (1994) or the more
recent Me, Myself and I (2007), has the verve, the sometimes bitter vitality that
characterizes the early work. It is too abstracted, too intent on presenting an
intellectual argument rather than a dramatic action. It lacks the urgent sense of need
that drives, say, The Zoo Story, the absurdist rage of The American Dream, or the
verbal and emotional fervor of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee began by
adventures into style encouraged Off Broadway. Moving to Broadway, he moved
into a form of realism, simultaneously domestic and poetic, that gave him his
greatest success. Since then, he appears to have lost his way. Whatever dramatic
language he chose in his earlier work, it was always the language of passion, a
corrosive anxiety and anger. That language does not appear to be with him, or is
perhaps not even what he wants, any more.
Sam Shepard saw his first play performed Off Off-Broadway in 1964: Cowboys.
Between then and 1975 he wrote more than 25 more. They include Icarus’s Mother
(1965), La Tourista (1966), Operation Sidewinder (1970), Mad Dog Blues (1971),
The Tooth of Crime (1972), Action (1974), and Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974).
Most of them are notable for radical shifts of character, tone, and even dramatic
medium – shifting suddenly from, say, expressionism to realism to allegory – for
jazz-like rhythms of action and speeches that resemble jazz riffs. Rarely linear,
logical, or consistent, they habitually use settings and symbolism in which cowboys
collide with monsters, rock mythology is mixed with religion and folklore, and the
America of small farms and wide open spaces, fast cars and jukeboxes is invaded by
magic and the supernatural. Certain themes recur, and were to become characteristic
of Shepard’s work. Action, for example, begins with the remark, “I’m looking forward
to my life”; it ends with “I had no idea what the world was. I had no idea how I got
there or why or who did it. I had no references for this.” Midway, one character
observes, “You act yourself out.” And that spells it out: in a random, crazy world,
without arbiters or guides, human beings tend and in fact have to experiment with
identity. Icarus’s Mother puts a further spin on this: that acting out, engaging inGGray_c05.indd 691ray_c 05 .indd 691 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM