Award Winning Dramatist Edward Albee to Present Puget Sound Lecture
January 10, 2006

Tacoma, Wash. – For more than four decades, theatergoers and critics alike have enjoyed Edward Albee’s controversial plays. Now Puget Sound residents will have a chance to hear the dramatist first hand as he discusses improvisation, the creative mind, and the state of American theater when he visits the University of Puget Sound. An evening with Edward Albee: Improvisation and the creative mind will begin at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16 at Schneebeck Concert Hall.  

“Few American playwrights have so consistently contributed to the life of the American theater from the 1960s to the present,” said Geoff Proehl, chairman of Puget Sound’s Theatre Arts department. “It’s an honor to have Albee on campus.” 

Albee has received two Tony Awards, a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, and three Pulitzer Prizes. He also has been awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievement, and the National Medal of Arts. His plays include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Tiny Alice, Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, and Seascape, which is currently enjoying a Broadway revival.  

The dramatist held a variety of odd jobs before hitting it big in 1959 with The Zoo Story, the tale of a drifter who acts out his own murder. Along with his other early works, including The Sandbox, and The American dream, The Zoo Story effectively gave birth to American absurdist drama.

 Albee describes his work as “an examination of the American scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy keen.” 

He frequently uses his lectures to describe how he believes the arts can be a catalyst for change. “The job of the arts,” says Albee, “is to hold a mirror up to us and say: ‘Look, this is how you really are. If you don’t like it, change.’” Albee’s lecture is the seventh in the series of Susan Resneck Pierce Lectures in Public Affairs and the Arts. The series is named for president emerita of the University of Puget Sound. It brings intellectuals, writers, and artists to the university to talk about interesting and challenging ideas that will stimulate further exploration and discussion on campus.  

Tickets are required to attend and advance purchase is recommended. Admission to the Albee lecture is $10 for the general public. For additional information, or to place a credit card order, phone 253.879.3419.  

Directions to the University of Puget Sound and information regarding parking is available at www.ups.edu/directions.xml .

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