Nearing 80, and no loss for words

By JERRY TALLMER

In the beginning was the word …

“When you pick up a script of Edward’s,” said Bill Irwin, who had been so self-effacingly brilliant in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Goat,” both by Edward Albee, “you look at a page of dialogue and feel the electricity of it. Every word is caused by the words before, and you feel the current of what’s coming next … There’s a music to his words. He once said he had really wanted to be a composer.”

Kathleen Butler, an understudy who had gone on to appear in “Three Tall Women” (and was asked by its author four years later: “Are you still tall?”) put it more microscopically: Your job as an actor in a play by Albee “is to take the word off the page, semi-colon, comma, period, silence.”

Ben Gazzara, who had been George to Colleen Dewhurst’s Martha in a celebrated revival of “Virginia Woolf,” recalled agonizing “to see what I could do to bring this person alive,” only to find “so many colors” in the role, and in himself — “colors I didn’t know I possessed.”

Quietly listening in to all this and a great deal more, a small smile sometimes flickering over his — okay, under his moustache — was Edward Albee himself, the triple Pulitzer-winning playwright who has been supplying us with an endless ribbon of nourishing grist to chew on from “The Zoo Story” (1960) to “Peter and Jerry” (2007) and hasn’t stopped yet.

On March 12 of next year he will be 80 years old. Meantime, at a black-tie gala last Sunday night in the town house on Gramercy Park South, once the home of Edwin Booth (American actor, 1833-1893), the Players, a club established there by Booth in 1888, was bestowing its 2007 Edwin Booth Lifetime Achievement Award on the said Mr. Edward Albee.

A note of vivacity to counterpoint the graciousness of the event was supplied at the outset by Players general manager John Martello, who cited Billy Wilder’s comment to the Hollywood establishment as an Academy Award went at long last to director David Lean: “Only two questions. One — who else? Two — what the hell took you so long?”

Hardly had the laughter settled down when Miss Elaine Stritch threw a little further touch of chasteness into the proceedings with “This is … fuck it,” followed by an Albee-“Virginia Woolf” defining anecdote, relayed to her once upon a time by the stage manager Robert Wright, one of whose tasks had been to circulate among the audience at matinees, and listen in.

He had followed an elderly couple up the aisle and out on the sidewalk, where the gray-haired wife informed her gray-haired husband: “You can say what you want, but married people don’t talk like that to each other.” And he said: ‘Oh Edith, for Christ’s sake, shut up.”

James Karen, an actor who goes back to the whole start of the Off-Broadway movement of the 1950s and ’60s, reminded this black-tie audience of the generosity and do-gooding (sorry, Edward, how else to put it?) of the producing team of Albee, Richard Barr, and Clinton Wilder, who, in Karen’s words, “didn’t go mad” with the great success of “Virginia Woolf” but rented the Vandam and Cherry Lane theaters to house and promote the works of struggling young playwrights, just as Albee himself had only lately been.

Playwrights and actors too, who otherwise, Karen dryly said, “would have had to live through Euripides and Moliere.”

Richard Thomas, who as a child actor had found Albee to be “unfailingly kind,” harked back to his own 6th- or 7th-grade school days, when he and a classmate, on the 79th Street crosstown bus, would read out loud — as loud as possible — from “The Zoo Story.” For his own part, Thomas always tried to do the part of Jerry, the madman who tells that odious story of the dog.

He too spoke of music — “the fearless, challenging, terrifying music of the voice of Edward Albee and the modern American theater.”

Mercedes Ruehl remembered how, as a brash young actress doing a reading “on book” – script in hand – she thought what the hell, she could bluff her way through or call for a line.

Later, in a basement dressing room, there was a knock on the door. It was the playwright himself. He held out his arms. She tumbled into them, and ended up giving him a kiss on the neck. He said one sentence: “But she really loved her father.” And departed. It was many years later – last year, in fact – that she realized what he’d been telling her: “You have the fact, now find the truth.”

Brian Murray, who was so superbly, so solidly scary opposite Marian Seldes in “The Play About the Baby” on Union Square, told how he had come from London to America many years ago – had in fact become an American – just to take a shot at getting into a play by Edward Albee.

It was now Marian Seldes, herself the recipient of an Edwin Booth Lifetime Achievement Award, who would hand a statuette of Edwin Booth as Hamlet to this year’s recipient – who else? – and what the hell had taken them so long?

The recipient kissed Ms. Seldes, and then said, to the assemblage: “Let me take you back to 1957 and 228 West 4th Street, in an apartment shared by seven or eight of my close friends.”

He had tried his hand at poetry (terrible), short stories (bad), a novel (boring). “You fancy yourself a writer,” he had told himself, scornfully, as he liberated a huge old typewriter from the Western Union office from which he worked as a telegram messenger.

(Remember telegrams?)

On that typewriter he wrote a short play called “The Zoo Story,” about two men, one of them, Peter, a button-down square, the other, Jerry, a sadomasochistic nut case.

“And I thought: Gee, if I can go on, maybe I can write something that will make me happy.” The “Zoo Story” was first produced in Germany, then here, at the Provincetown Playhouse, in January 1960, on a double-bill with “Krapp’s Last Tape,” by Samuel Beckett.

Edward Albee quit his day job.

And got happy.

And we – the world – got rich. In words, ideas, emotions, realizations, heartbeats. Happy Birthday, Edward.