Albee Directs Albee

History

The Albee Directs Albee project was a forty week international tour of universities and arts centers throughout the United States, South Korea, and Japan, during which Edward Albee directed the troupe in presenting eight of his one-act plays. The tour commenced on August 27, 1978 at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and was completed on June 15, 1979 at the Urban Centre in Hong Kong.

The eight plays, all one-acts, were divided into three performances: I. The Zoo Story and The American Dream, II. Fam and Yam, The Sandbox, and Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung, and III. Counting the Ways and Listening. The plays were directed by Albee while the project was produced by Mark Hall Amitin. The company of actors included: Eileen Burns, Catherine Bruno, Patricia Kilgarriff, Wyman Pendleton, and Stephen Howe.

Edward Albee (1928- ), Pulitzer Prize winning American dramatist, began writing plays at age thirty. His first play was The Zoo Story, which was awarded the Vernon Rice Award. He is best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), his first full-length drama. Albee was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1996 received the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts. In 2005 he was awarded the special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.