SOURCE: "Edward Albee Salutes a Great Vaudevillian," in The New York Times, April 10, 1994, p. 12.

[A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Albee is an American playwright, scriptwriter, poet, and short story writer. In the following tribute, he remarks on how Ionesco influenced his approach to drama.]

While I wasn't exactly born in a trunk—well, I may have been, for I never knew my natural parents, their habits—my adopting family was involved with vaudeville. They were not jugglers or comedians—more's the pity—but owner-management, the Keith Albee Vaudeville Circuit.

The house I tried to grow up in was frequented by performers, and the likes of Ed Wynn and Victor Moore dandled me when I was a tot. My family had me go to the theater when I was a little boy, and my first theatrical memory is of Jumbo at the old Hippodrome—Jimmy Durante and...