Edward Albee

Even when Edward Albee is not at his best--and with "Seascape," his language and character dynamics feel wearied--his work is the result of a distinctive mind obsessively probing life's recesses for meaning. His writing consistently cajoles more questions to the surface than it seeks to answer, and because his dramas suggest that mystery is the design of things, they are perplexing by nature.

Even when Edward Albee is not at his best--and with "Seascape" his language and character dynamics feel wearied--his work is the result of a distinctive mind obsessively probing life's recesses for meaning. His writing consistently cajoles more questions to the surface than it seeks to answer, and because his dramas suggest that mystery is the design of things, they are perplexing by nature.

He has been on the scene for nearly 30 years now, and most audiences and critics still don't seem to know what to make of Edward Albee, who remains one of America's best-known but most enigmatic and exasperating playwrights. Although he has received two Pulitzer Prizes, and though his "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" from 1962 is one of the landmark works of the American theater, Albee's more recent work generally is seen as far too abstract and remote.

Randy Coull was a little terrified. A senior at Chula Vista High School, Coull did not look forward to having his first play critiqued by playwright Edward Albee--the same Edward Albee whose angry drama, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" first shocked audiences in the early 1960s. The same Edward Albee who won Pulitzer Prizes for "A Delicate Balance" and "Seascape." "I was a bit in awe of what he had done," Coull said.

One of the American theater's most praised and panned playwrights came to town this week to do one of his favorite things--talk and work with children involved in theater--and ended up reveling in another treat, lobbing figuratively fiery Molotov cocktails at his nemeses, the American theater critics. Edward Albee (pronounced ALL-bee) is here at the request of Deborah Salzer, founder of the California Young Playwrights Project.

It used to be that San Diego's Old Globe theater would open like a summer flower full of Shakespearean festivity, and as winter approached would settle into becoming the city's first community theater. But ever since Jack O'Brien came on as artistic director in 1982, he's been trying to make the Globe a year-round professional theater. For his Dec. 5 opening of Shaw's "Pygmalion," he claims he's assembled "the best cast for anything I've ever done."