Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee (A Delicate Balance, Seascape, Three Tall Women) will give a colloqium, Feb. 16, 1997, at the Denver Center For The Performing Arts. The one day, 1 PM engagement coincides with the Center's run of Three Tall Women, Jan. 30-March 29.
The free, open-to-the-public event caps a brief residency for Albee with the students of the National Theatre Conservatory and members of the Denver Center Theatre company.
Albee's other plays include The Death Of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Tiny Alice and The Lady From Dubuque. Said Founder and Chairman of the Denver Center, Donald R. Seawell, "Edward Albee is a living national treasure. He is one of those rare individuals whose imagination is continually opening up new territory and forging new literary conventions."
Director Anthony Powell calls Albee's play, "A stylish chamber piece for four actors, intense and wickedly funny... In a curious way, Albee's play is a celebration of life lived on its own terms and, to my mind, the very best sort of celebration -- one based not on sentimental emotion and the easy platitude, but on heartbreaking wit and the cold, hard truth of things the way they are."
Denver Center's winter newsletter reprinted Albee's introduction to the published version of Women, in which the author answers charges that he used Women, about a stern, unhappy matriarch, as an attack on his own mother: "I knew my subject -- my adoptive mother, whom I knew from my infancy...until her death over 60 years later, and who, perhaps, knew me as well. Perhaps. I knew I did not want to write a revenge piece -- could not honestly do so, for I felt no need for revenge. We had managed to make each other very unhappy over the years, but I was past all that, though I think she was not. I harbor no ill-will towards her; it is true I did not like her much, could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self. As she moved toward 90, began rapidly failing both physically and mentally, I was touched by the survivor, the figure clinging to the wreckage, only partly of her own making, refusing to go under." For information on the Albee engagement, which will be held at the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, or on DTC's staging of Three Tall Women, call (303) 893-4000.
