SOURCE: "Edward Albee: His Language and Imagination," in Prairie Schooner, Vol. XL, No. 1, Spring, 1966, pp. 139-46.

The following essay explores Albee's "problems with language, " arguing that "Albee's words, seemingly self-generative and unending, become substitutes for real acts. "

The experience of reading or rereading an Albee play after witnessing its production brings none of the disappointments that follow upon confronting a work of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller in print—a discovery of a thinness of text, a suspicion of whatever emotion or power the play managed to evoke on the stage. 1 Albee, in contrast to these dramatists, reads as well as he plays. Yet, criticism of Albee generally has failed to examine the defining quality of that language and its relation to the world and to the characters that Albee chooses to portray. From The Zoo Story to Tiny Alice we hear "the jazz of a very special...