Profile: Playwright Edward Albee

Playwright and philosopher Albert Camus held that every artist, no matter the medium, spends his or her entire life working out one idea or problem, has one thing to say. He wrote that even no matter how many media were used creatively, the same problem was the focus of the artist’s life and work.

Understanding this, I’ve gone through phases of working with and in response to (being inspired by) the work of various artists. We all do this, but we don’t always understand why. We’re living myths in our lives, and there are others who provide examples for us along our way. We can lose interest when the artist seems to diverge from our path, or when our path changes and that of the artist seems not to.

I had this experience with the work of the playwright Edward Albee, ending a few years ago. I’d read or seen most of his work, and what he was trying to do became clear to me. And after that, I was bored with him and moved on. Thanks, Ed, I seemed to say, but I’ve gotten all I can get from you. Thanks for your time, and best wishes on whatever you laid out for yourself this time around.

And then, yesterday, something happened.

I heard an NPR interview with and about him, about the first act he’d written and appended to his famous one-act, Zoo Story. It’s a story about a fairly well-to-do, rather uptight, unimaginative man who has a chance encounter with a very different sort of man in a park. The new version (Peter and Jerry) includes an act previous to this act that tells the story of the rather uptight man, putting him at home with his wife. (I haven’t yet read it, but this is from the description in the radio story.)

Albee said something about the play had always stayed with him and made him want to do something else with/to it. When I heard about the new act and therefore context, I got back on the Albee train - he’d enlarged his previous vision, the one I saw and read too much of and became bored by. This play is the one that launched his career, and many in the theater world hold it as sacred and were confounded by his audacity to change the play they loved so. He commented in the interview that he’s after all the one who wrote it.

I couldn’t locate a birth time for Albee (12 March 1928, Washington, DC), but he’s got a Uranus-Jupiter in Aries that I just really want to put in the 3rd house. That would be an early-morning birth, and Chiron in Taurus would be in the 4th, one kind of signature for adoption. Now, it’s just speculation, but I rreeaalllllyy want that Uranus-Jupiter to be in the 3rd, because of his lifelong unapologetic styles of writing and speaking, and the nature of the stories he’s inspired to tell.

Without the time of birth, we can see the South Node in Sagittarius, with Saturn pretty tightly on it. This paints a picture of an orientation to beliefs and ideas that’s built intentionally and with much hard work. The Sun in Pisces squares the nodes, indicating that something very large in the karmic past, something that was orbited, was not approached and understood in ways that seemed to get him where he was going, and he now has the challenge of learning the right size and use of ways of defining the sense of self.

The South Node ruler Jupiter is conjunct Uranus in Aries, and squared by Pluto in Cancer. The role he expects to have (South Node ruler) is that of Jupiter in Aries conjunct Uranus in Aries - someone with something big, original and probably cutting to say. The square to Pluto in Cancer screams that he is not aligned with tradition and the powers that wish to uphold it, but is doing something original that probably challenges everything traditional.

And then there’s the pileup in Aquarius - Eros, Pallas, Mars, Arjunsuri, Ceres, Venus, Mercury, and Vesta. This underscores his expectation of the role of being Uranian, given the conjunction of the South Node ruler with Uranus. His sense of proportion and how he understands harmony and balance (Venus) is working together with how he perceives things and his communication style (Mercury), in the sign of things that are different. And the drive to action being there indicates that not only is what he wants to think about and express creatively (Ve-Me) in the sign of things working differently than normal, but how he’s moved to get things done (Mars) also works differently - how he goes about getting out there his ideas and creativity we can also expect to be different.

His North Node is in Gemini, which indicates a call to stretch into the new territory of flexibility, and curiosity, of openness to new information. Reworking the piece that launched his career is a very Gemini thing, most certainly not a South Node in Sagittarius conjunct Saturn thing. His willingness to stretch into what is new territory for him (the North Node for any us is new territory) surprises me more than his willingness to “ruffle feathers,” as he’s always been very good at that (check his biography for stories of him as the editor of the school paper). But refiguring a major work of his intentional design (Saturn in Sagittarius)?

The best part for me is that Albee’s almost 80 years old. I’ve always knows it’s never too late for 0ld playwrights to learn new tricks, but to see it happening with this one is an inspiration to me.

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January 20, 2008 By Tom Jacobs