SOURCE: "Harold Pinter & Edward Albee: The First Post-moderns," in Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in American and Britain, University Press of America, 1984, pp. 25-47.

In the excerpt below, Simard explores Albee's technique of undercutting "conventional expectations by dividing his emphasis between external and internal reality. " The critic further argues that Albee's "realistic framework, the family, serves as the point of departure for his own type of subjective reality, an examination of his characters ' psyches."

Albee was early heralded in America as the brilliant young playwright and the inheritor and savior of the native dramatic tradition. Like Pinter in Britain, Albee was the first American dramatist to look beyond national boundaries and offer an infusion of Continental experimentalism to a drama that was dominated by the social realism of Miller and the psychological realism of Williams, although neither of these playwrights had produced a major work for some time...