Famous playwright Edward Albee dies

– Three-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and author of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Edward Albee died on Friday at the age of 88 in his home on Long Island, United States.

Considered one of the most important American playwrights of his time, Albee wrote a variety of intense, controversial plays diving into anxieties, disillusionments and death.

The dramatist’s personal assistant, Jakob Holder, confirmed his Friday death to The New York Times. Albee spent many years teaching playwriting at the University of Houston.

Other noted works included “Seascape”, which Albee directed when it opened on Broadway in 1974 and had an absurdist twist – an elderly couple are joined on the beach by two human-sized talking lizards as they consider their relationships.

The play focuses on a middle-aged professor and his wife, George and Martha, who come home after a faculty party and are visited by a younger couple.

Albee also won Pulitzer Prizes for 1967’s A Delicate Balance, 1975’s Seascape and 1991’s Three Tall Women.

Albee moved to New York’s Bohemian heart, Greenwich Village, at the age of 20 and worked a variety of jobs, including telegram messenger.

Estranged from his parents, Albee moved to NY and worked as a messenger for Western Union before gaining notice with “The Zoo Story“, a one-act play written in 1958 about two strangers meeting on a bench in Central Park. Most recently, his play The Sandbox was revived at Signature in a triple bill titled Signature Plays.

“All art should be useful”, he once told NPR. Written in 1958, it was first produced in Berlin, translated into German.

The 2000s saw a pair of major Broadway revivals of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The plays sharp-tongued humor and dark themes were the hallmarks of Albees style. He typically wrote about the Northeastern suburban upper-crust in which he was raised, aiming to provoke audiences rather than reward them with comfortable pleasures. And now they’re coming back. No cause of death was publicly revealed, although he had suffered from diabetes.

Albee once told the Paris Review that he decided at age 6 that he was a writer but chose to work in the format of plays after concluding he was not a very good poet or novelist.

With “Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and 1964s “Tiny Alice, ” Albee shook up a Broadway that had been dominated by Tennessee Williams, Miller and their intellectual disciples. He will be sorely missed.