IS ALBEE AN ABSURDIST? SHOULD HE BE?

IS ALBEE AN ABSURDIST? SHOULD HE BE? Ben Brantley argued in the article I linked to yesterday that “Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard are directly descended from Beckett” and that “Stoppard and Albee remind us of how much the Absurdists have in common with music-hall comedians.” Fintan O’Toole argued several years ago in this article that Albee is not at heart an Absurdist, and, to the extent he has been influenced by the Absurdists, he has taken the wrong path. O’Toole said that: “I find it hard to understand how Albee could have been mistaken for a fellow traveler of Ionesco, Beckett, or Pinter”; and that “The obvious truth that Albee’s is an individual and idiosyncratic American voice was obscured by his image as a European absurdist on the wrong side of the Atlantic.” O’Toole quoted a warning concerning Albee from Harold Clurman in 1961 of the danger of an abstraction that “loses touch with its roots in concrete individual experience” and concluded that “Albee’s recruitment into the theater of the absurd encouraged precisely the kind of abstract decoration that Clurman had warned against….” I think O’Toole’s article is brilliant and agree with O’Toole and Clurman that Albee is at his best when he is least abstract. I would point to THREE TALL WOMEN. The three women are called A, B, and C. Despite the abstraction in their names, it is the idiosyncratic voice of the oldest of the three, with its evident “roots in concrete individual experience” that gives the play its power.