SOURCE: "Edward Albee: Don't Make Waves," in The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960's, The Macmillan Company, 1969, pp. 24-53.

In the following essay, the critic explores the recurring themes of isolation and separation throughout Albee's work.

Something tells me it's all
 happenin ' at the zoo.
                                               —Simon and Garfunkel

Edward Albee is inescapably the American playwright of the 1960's. His first play, The Zoo Story, opened in New York, on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's Krapp 's Last Tape, at the Provincetown Playhouse on January 14, 1960. In his Introduction to Three Plays (1960), Albee tells how his play, which was written in 1958, passed from friend to friend, from country to country, from manuscript to tape to production (in Berlin in 1959) before it made its way back to the United States. "It's one of those things a person has to do," says Jerry; "sometimes a person has to go...