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the stage, at which point misinterpretation becomes a real possibility. (It’s always a possibility,
but for other reasons, Albee says:
“Some people have written that
it’s hard to understand my work,
but they’re not very intelligent. If
you’re stupid you will misunderstand what I’m saying.”)
He’s advised young playwrights
to write “so precisely that [the actors and directors] really have to
be creative to go away from the author’s intentions.”
Take one direction he wrote for
a character in A Delicate Balance:
“Speaks usually softly, with a tiny
hint of a smile on her face: not sardonic, not sad... wistful, maybe.”
“I’m not one of these playwrights who thinks directors and
actors should have free rein to
do whatever they want to do,”
Albee says. “If they want to do
what they want to do, they should
write their own plays.”
When a play has on occasion
escaped his control, Albee’s solution is simple: never work with
that director again. “And I discourage other people from working with them,” he adds.
Albee’s most popular and critically acclaimed work to-date, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, has had
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many occasions to be misread over
the years. The play, which was first
staged at the Billy Rose Theatre in
New York when Albee was 34, took
him