September 17, 2016, Who's afraid of... time marching on?
In the brief interregnum between 9-11+15 and the 15th anniversary of this blog (tomorrow, actually... not sure what, if anything, I'm going to say on the subject) we are presented with the inevitability of the march of time with the loss of one of the greats of American art, the playwright Edward Albee. Winner of the Tony and the Pulitzer, some of his best known works include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?
Like other geniuses of the modern era, Beckett and Ionesco (or O'Neill and Miller), Mr. Albee generally didn't write plays that would leave one with a "feel good" escapist experience; quite the contrary: he explored existential angst, in his case, often exploring the deep dark secrets of the materially affluent. Given how disturbing his work was, I can't count myself as a "fan," but in an era of ever more reality-t.v.-style-crap (which, of course, has now swallowed up the gestalt in the ascendancy of you-know-who), a dose of actual reality is always welcome.
Mr. Albee's passing, at 88, is just another marking of time. We ignore him-- and the stark (as it were) lessons that reality is trying to teach us-- at our peril. R.I.P., Mr. Albee.