SOURCE: "The Rehabilitation of Edward Albee," in The New Republic, Vol. 210, No. 14, April 4, 1994, pp. 26, 28.

[Brustein is an American educator, critic, and actor who frequently writes about drama. In the highly positive review below, he discusses Albee's focus on the past and present in Three Tall Women, praising it as "a mature piece of writing."]

A number of years ago, while praising Edward Albee's much reviled stage adaptation of Lolita, I commented on the startling reverses in the fortunes of this once ionized American dramatist: "The crunching noises the press pack makes while savaging his recent plays are in startling contrast to the slavering sounds they once made in licking his earlier ones…. If each man kills the thing he loves, then each critic kills the thing he hypes … brutalizing the very celebrity he has created."

I was generalizing not only from Albee's career, but from that of Miller...