Editor’s note:On September 16th, American playwright edward ablee died at his home in Montauk, New York, at the age of 88. Albee won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama for three times and the Tony Prize for Best Drama for two times. He is the greatest playwright in the United States after Eugene O ‘Neill, tennessee williams and arthur miller.
Many of Albee’s plays have been translated and introduced into China. In 2013, Sanhui Books and Xinxing Publishing House published The Goat: Albue’s Plays, which included three representative plays. This article is a reading guide written by Hu Kaiqi, the translator of this book, for three plays. It is authorized by Sanhui Books to be used by The Paper, with some abridgements.
Edward ablee Oriental IC data
Edward Albee is the greatest playwright in the United States after Eugene O ‘Neill, tennessee williams and arthur miller, and is the flag of serious drama in contemporary America and even the world. Since The Zoo Story was first staged in the late 1950s, Albee’s plays have continuously shocked the American theater. Up to now, Albee has created more than 30 plays, and won three Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama, two Tony Prize for Best Drama, three Best Drama Literature Awards and four Lifetime Achievement Awards. His masterpieces include The Zoo Story, The American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Adeline Virginia Woolf? "delicate balance", "seascape", "three tall women", "goat or who is Sylvia? ","at home in the zoo "and so on.
As a representative of American serious drama, Albee always pays sharp and sober attention to the times and society, and reflects and criticizes the social reality and human existence fearlessly and mercilessly. He once said, "What people see on Broadway is not drama at all, but some mass-produced products, which will only make people intoxicated or sleepy, but not wake up and wake up." His plays are often performed in off broadway and even abroad, and finally returned to Broadway.
Albee’s works are deeply influenced by naturalism, surrealism, symbolism, absurd drama and other schools, but his exploration and modernity are mainly reflected in the connotation and thought of his works. As he said: "… the writer’s responsibility is to be an extraordinary social critic-to show people the true nature of the world and human beings he has seen, and to warn:’ Do you like it? If you don’t like it, change it.’ "
Albee embodies his unique style in the prompts of characters’ dialogues in his plays. For example, in The Goat or Who’s Sylvia? Stevie (honestly) If you are seeing that woman, I think we need to talk. Martin (stop, silent for a long time; Honestly) If I am like that … We will talk. " And "Ross (wow! ) You are in love! " Such hints also appear from time to time in At Home in the Zoo and The Garden of Desire. I kept this kind of Albee-style personalized prompt by literal translation.
Goat: Albee’s Plays
The goat or who is Sylvia in this book? "At Home in the Zoo" and "At Home in the Zoo" were published in Drama Art, and "The Garden of Desire" has been put on the stage of China by China National Theatre, while "Goat or Who is Sylvia? It also premiered in Beijing in 2012.
In 1967, after winning the Pulitzer Prize, edward ablee was interviewed in the theater. Oriental IC data
At Home in the Zoo: Human Isolation and Alienation
In 1958, edward ablee became famous with his first one-act play The Zoo Story (1958), which shocked the western society. This drama, which profoundly shows the alienation, isolation and loneliness of human beings in modern commercial society, has become a world-recognized classic of drama literature in the following half century. This play, originally named Peter and Jerry, was written by Albee in one go within three weeks before his 30th birthday. The author originally cast it on Broadway in new york, but it was rejected by the producer. So The Zoo Story came to Europe, premiered at Berlin Art Festival in September 1959, and began its new york premiere at Provinse Town Theatre in January 1960.
In 2008, Albee surprisingly changed his one-act drama "The Zoo Story" 50 years ago into a two-act drama "At Home at the Zoo" (2009) and staged it in the second theater in off broadway, new york. Shakespeare in the past or neil simon today have rewritten some of their past masterpieces in the form of sequels or prequels, but it is rare to rewrite them in a big way on the stage. Moreover, in the past half century, The Zoo Story is one of the most famous and frequently performed American plays in the world.
This great play about the murder scene between a gentleman Peter and a poor man Jerry in new york Central Park has always been a classic textbook for drama students. Over the years, countless commentators have discussed and analyzed Albee’s profound exposure of human alienation in the mid-20th century. Although he also wrote Who’s Afraid of Adeline Virginia Woolf? Three Tall Women, Delicate Balance and Goat or Who’s Sylvia? "and other thirty plays, but the shock and passion of" Zoo Story "is unique.
In fact, Albee’s idea of rewriting The Zoo Story has a long history. This play, which has become a world classic, was once performed as a short play with Beckett’s The Last Tape of klapp and other short plays. Albee has always regretted this. In the late 1990s, 40 years after The Zoo Story appeared, Albee planned to add a scene for Peter. "There is some imbalance, and Jerry kept telling in the play that Peter had no time to talk. I hope to know Peter better. "
Albee doesn’t agree with playwrights to rewrite their previous plays drastically. He said, "It can’t be rewritten. Times have changed and people are not the same." So he didn’t make a big move on The Zoo Story, but just wrote At Home as the first act of the whole play. He even mentioned that when he conceived the Zoo Story in 1958, he visited Peter and Anna and their living room. "I just couldn’t write this scene at that time."
Albiyuan traced his initial creative impulse: "I know Anna so well because I know what Peter’s wife should look like." He felt that At Home seemed to flow from his heart, and he just showed the relationship between the couple naturally. As a solemn and humorous study of mediocre civilization, At Home shows the conversation between a loving couple in today’s society.
At the beginning of the first act of At Home in the Zoo, just after noon on Sunday, in a Danish modern living room in an apartment building in East Seventies Street, Manhattan, two or three avenues away from Central Park, a peaceful and elegant middle-aged gentleman husband Peter and his dignified and quiet wife Anna appeared. Two silent daughters are upstairs, and Peter is sitting and reviewing an extremely important and boring textbook that has never been published by their publishing company.
Anna walked out of the kitchen and casually declared, "We should talk." So they talked about family chores: fireplace, children, microwave oven, cats, parrots, and then talked about each other’s sleeping state and Anna’s habit of night outing before dawn. Anna told puzzled Peter that she wanted to have her breasts removed to prevent cancer. The two chatted with each other jokingly about death, love and people’s madness, and also associated with "thinking about thinking about something."
With Anna’s outspokenness, Peter said carefully that he thought his penis was "shrinking". Anna suppressed her smile to show sympathy. She knew that sex and sexual topics were not Peter’s strong points, and she called him a "gentleman". They talked about circumcision and clitoris … Then the conversation turned back to why Anna proposed to talk. During the conversation, they suddenly found that some terrible unspeakable thing threatened their quiet life; They found each other unable to pour out their deepest fears.
Peter recalled the details of violent sex with a girl when he was drunk in college. That crazy sex ended in blood dripping and pain and shame, so Peter was always careful in his subsequent sex for fear of hurting others. During the conversation, Anna slapped Peter in the face and immediately hugged him and kissed him passionately. She said that she just wanted to surprise him with suspense. In laughter, they hoped that a sudden tornado would completely destroy their safe and orderly family life. Then, the two said goodbye to "I love you". Anna went to the kitchen, and Peter went to Central Park with the boring textbook.
The second act of At Home in the Zoo is the original Zoo Story. Albee didn’t rewrite this scene, only made some abridgements, so the text is the same as his original 1999 version. At the beginning of the second act, Peter who came to Central Park was sitting on a bench reading. Then, a disheveled man in his thirties, Jerry, appeared. Depressed-looking Jerry insisted on talking to Peter. Jerry lives in a cubicle on the top floor of an old building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He has no friends or relatives and is alone. He told about his homosexual experiences in adolescence and his life as a prostitute now. Peter was very embarrassed by his dark and filthy candor. In addition to satisfying the lust of the slutty and dirty landlady, Jerry has to deal with the landlady’s "black monster" dog that keeps chasing him. After repeatedly failing to please the evil dog, he poisoned it. The bad dog survived and ignored Jerry, so there was only indifference between man and dog. Jerry can’t communicate with dogs and people.
Because the first scene "At Home" shows the spiritual estrangement and emotional alienation between Peter and his wife, in the second scene, when Jerry frantically tells the loneliness and isolation of his existence in a monologue, Peter is more clearly aware of the distortion, fracture and isolation between himself and Anna. His deep anger, anxiety and despair contributed to the growing conflict between him and Jerry for the park bench, until he angrily held Jerry’s sharp blade to defend himself, until Jerry swooped on the sharp blade and committed suicide.
In the scene of In the Zoo, we have to face the isolation and alienation of people in modern society with fear. In the scene at home, we can only look directly at it painfully: even in a happy family and marriage, isolation and alienation are everywhere. From Peter and Anna’s emotional and spiritual indifference to Jerry’s isolated and absurd living condition, bloody suicide in the park seems to be the inevitable outcome. As you can imagine, when Peter fled the park and ran home like a wounded beast, when Anna tried to comfort him, Jerry’s suicide caused the peaceful world around them to collapse. The couple had hoped for waves and ripples in a peaceful life, but the revenge of bad luck came unexpectedly.
Stills of "At Home in the Zoo"
In the society of vicious expansion of modern industrial civilization, people are gradually losing their humanity and personality. When people are alienated by materials, interpersonal relationships are also alienated. In the noisy, complicated and almost crazy modern city, people are like a group of worker ants, crawling repeatedly every day. People think, people get tired, and people get lost. People pursue material things, but they are alienated by them after all. On the park bench in At Home in the Zoo, Peter sits at one end and Jerry sits at the other, separated by a barrier, just like Jerry mentioned the zoo-"all animals are separated". This sense of isolation is the living form of human beings in today’s society, and it is also one of the phenomena of material alienation. Crazy industrial civilization has not made human beings truly "civilized", on the contrary, it has made human beings move from civilization to barbarism, just like the two couples who bite each other in the novel "Slaughter the God" by the French playwright Jasmina Razer. The lonely individuals of Peter, Anna and Jerry are the portrayal of everyone in today’s society. The pain of each individual is also the pain of the whole mankind.
"At Home in the Zoo" makes the audience realize the threat hidden in the survival of every modern person. If "At Home" is a slap in people’s face and "At the Zoo" is a punch in people’s abdomen, you can imagine the horror and confusion of the theater fans gasping. For the two plays written 50 years apart, Albee insists that they are a whole. "This is a complete play. Peter’s experience in the first act contributed to the conflict between him and Jerry in the second act. The completeness and profundity of this two-act drama far exceeds the one-act Zoo Story. "
The Zoo Story has been staged many times in China, and it was also performed at Nanluoguxiang Drama Festival in May 2011. For the audience who are used to The Zoo Story, At Home in the Zoo is more like two independent dramas. It’s just as well. The emotional ice in the first act and the emotional fire in the second act do form a clear contrast between them. If at home is regarded as another play by Albee that pays attention to the emotion and ecology of middle-aged couples, it is different from his previous Marriage Drama (1987) and Goat or Who is Sylvia? Compared with the characters in "Peter and Anna", the scene of Peter and Anna can go deeper into the hearts of the audience.
It is worth mentioning that in November, 2011, another absurd family drama "Sex and the Garden" by Albee was also put on the stage in Beijing by China National Theatre.
At Home in the Zoo shows us the changes of Albee’s writing style in the past 50 years. Albee is 80 years old, but her creativity is still strong. "In the Zoo" 50 years ago was full of anger and youthful agitation; After 50 years, At Home is thoughtful and wise, with philosopher’s feelings. The former is angry, the latter is quiet. Whether it is pain or sorrow, whether it is sentimentality or cynicism, this talented playwright has always been deeply concerned about the ups and downs of human destiny and the decline of modern civilization.
In 2004, the London edition of Goat or Who is Sylvia? "stills
Goat or Who is Sylvia? Notes on the definition of a tragedy
The absurd family tragedy of contemporary American society, Goat or Who is Sylvia? 》（The Goat or Who is Sylvia? , 2002) won several drama awards such as Tony’s best drama in 2002. Goat or Who is Sylvia? In March 2002, it premiered at the John Goolden Theatre on Broadway, with a total of 309 performances. In 2004, the London edition of Goat or Who is Sylvia? The British premiere began again. "Who’s Sylvia" in the title of this play is taken from the song "Who’s Sylvia?" by Proteus in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. 》。
Martin Gray, the hero of the play, is a typical decent, upright and brilliant architect in American society. He lives an ideal and happy life with his beloved wife and son. In his lucky week, he came to the door three times. In addition to his 50th birthday party, he also won the highest international architectural design award and a huge contract for landmark architectural design. However, when he revealed his unspeakable secrets to his friends in fear-when he had sex with a goat (Sylvia), everything around him-family, affection, life and career fell apart in an instant.
Goat or Who is Sylvia? The challenge to people’s morality lies in how to face the social forbidden zones such as extramarital sex, homosexuality, incest and animal rape in contemporary society, and at the same time, the goat or who is Sylvia? It also conveys the desire of modern people to return to nature. Martin is at the peak of his career and happy in his family life. However, it is conceivable that all kinds of reputation and crazy material civilization in modern society have alienated human beings and overwhelmed Martin. This is why he hates public masks and is obsessed with finding an idyllic land.
The beauty of the country made him linger and forget his worries. Now he fell in love with a goat and had sex with it. On the moral level, this extremely abnormal behavior is shameful, but in human nature, it may be a release under the long-term pressure of alienation. It is the pastoral scenery that returns to nature that awakens Martin’s instinct and primitive desire. Although his choice is shocking, he feels holy, happy and beyond all love …
As far as drama style is concerned, The Goat or Who is Sylvia? "Who’s Afraid of Adeline Virginia Woolf?" Albee won the Tony Award for Best Drama on Broadway 40 years ago. 》（Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? 1962), there is a return to realism: clear plots, concrete scenes and stylized dialogues. As the mainstream writer of American serious drama, Albee’s avant-garde style is more manifested in events and themes than in the form of drama.
Goat or Who is Sylvia? The whole play is divided into three scenes without intermission. The core of the whole play is the fierce confrontation and debate between Martin and Stevie.
The Gothic atmosphere in Albee’s plays, or the surreal dream and its mysterious symbol and deliberate concealment all make critics and audiences feel that the goat in this play is just a symbol and a metaphor, and the bestiality in the play is just the playwright’s literary thinking and exploration of a social concept. But the goat or who is Sylvia? The language is so vivid and touching, and the scene is so realistic that the audience can’t avoid Albee’s deliberate warning: sometimes a goat is a goat.
At the end of the first scene, Martin revealed the secrets of his heart to Ross; When the second scene begins, Stevie has learned the truth from Ross’s letter. Martin’s son Billy immediately fell into confusion and anger; Stevie then fiercely attacked and blamed Martin and asked him to explain this unforgivable behavior. When Martin tried his best to communicate with her and pour out his troubles, Stevie kept interrupting him, making the audience in the theater laugh their heads off. When Martin painfully told her that he loved her as always, Stevie replied coldly, "But I am a human being, I only have two breasts, and I can only walk upright …"
In The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? In an interview before the premiere of new york, Albee said that he hoped to test the audience’s tolerance through this play. He said: "All civilizations have arbitrary norms on their tolerance. This play shows how a family is deeply shaken by an unimaginable event and how they solve this dilemma. I hope that people will give new thoughts on the reasonable direction of their own values. " Undoubtedly, this is also a test of human nature, an extremely complex and deep exploration: the nature of love, the mystery of sex, human empathy and so on.
Albee’s provocative idea is that love, no matter what form, is an undeniable objective existence, and even social norms, cultural customs and personal wishes can’t overwhelm it. Martin can’t defend his behavior, so he can only beg Stevie’s understanding and forgiveness, but he firmly believes that his love for Sylvia is sincere and deep, insisting that the encounter with her is an "epiphany" and "once it happens, there is no retreat". He claimed that his love for Sylvia was essentially the same as his love for Stevie, which was unacceptable and incomprehensible to Stevie.
If love is an abstraction that is not limited by inherent moral values, then human sexual behavior is distinct and concrete, and it inevitably bears moral responsibility. Therefore, in the current concept of human society, the love between Martin and goat is undoubtedly an inherent evil. He thought his love for the goat was "irrelevant to everything", but found that it was related to everything around him.
Goat or Who is Sylvia? The subtitle of the play is "Annotation on the Definition of a Tragedy". Albee pointed out that his allusions originated from the ancient Greek tragedy, and the word "tragedy" originated from the "song of the goat" in ancient Greek. In the first scene, when Ross asked about the strange and secret whistle, Martin coolly called it "the goddess of mercy".
Bentley, a dramatist, wrote in his book Benlly, The life of the Drama: "In tragedy, people are both angels and beasts, and they are fighting." This idea is in "goat or who is Sylvia?" It was echoed in ". Martin said it was the soul, and Stevie insisted on sexual desire. When Stevie pointed out that their dilemma was "You are a wild animal", Martin calmly replied, "I think I am … I think we are all wild animals." Martin admitted that he was "miserable" and "deeply divided", but Stevie couldn’t forgive him. The "goddess of mercy" didn’t appear, only a cavity of revenge anger. "You ruined me, well, God has eyes! I let you destroy it with me! " Goat or Who is Sylvia? The dilemma of human nature in this extreme state presented in "The Tragedy" profoundly completes the annotation of a tragic definition.
At the end of the play, Stevie dragged Sylvia’s body on the stage covered in blood. Love, sympathy and understanding disappeared, leaving only hatred, revenge and misunderstanding. Looking at the goat lying in a pool of blood, Martin looked up and wailed the heartbreaking fate of him and Sylvia. He could only cry, "Does no one understand this? Why can’t anyone understand … I’m lonely … so … lonely! " At this moment, Martin Gray is like the ghost of Oedipus-painfully blinding himself, leaving the warmth and sympathy of the world forever and disappearing into the wilderness.
Edward ablee’s The Garden of Desire
A Garden of Desire: The Collapse and Degeneration of a Flashy Society
Edward ablee’s "Garden of Desire" was originally named "Everything in the Garden" (1967), and its original author was the famous British playwright Giles Cooper. The play was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in March 1962. In December 1966, 48-year-old Cooper died young. In order to commemorate him, the American version of "Garden of Desire" adapted by Albee was staged on Broadway in new york in 1967. Albee’s Garden of Desire satirizes and exposes the hypocritical and greedy American money society, which makes it the most important and controversial one in his adaptation, but it is also the most successful one: the popular comedy Garden of Desire and his best original drama Who is afraid of Adeline Virginia Woolf? "has been put on the screen.
In November, 2011, as the first part of the National Theatre’s "Famous Classics: Desire Trilogy", the Garden of Desire, directed by Han Jie, premiered at the newly-built National Theatre. This black comedy, which reveals the greed for money in contemporary human society, has been playing for a long time in the West, and it is also loved by China audiences in Beijing. In February, 2012, this drama began its second hot performance in national centre for the performing arts. More than ten years ago, the then China Youth Art Theatre moved this play. Nowadays, owning a garden villa has become a dream in people’s hearts, and "Desire Garden" undoubtedly has a profound warning meaning for the current extremely impetuous social mentality of worshipping money.
In Albee’s "Garden of Desire", Jenny and Richard, who live in the garden villa, are struggling to make ends meet, so they can only desperately maintain their dignity; Their good friend, Jack, a rich painter who inherited millions of inheritance, is carefree but lonely, so he always comes to Jenny for emotional comfort. Jack loves Jenny and Richard so much that he is determined to leave his ten million inheritance to the couple after his death. But half a year later, Jenny and Richard made a fortune. It turned out that Jenny was lured by Mrs. Tus and went to Mrs. Tus’s brothel in the city for prostitution without telling Richard. At the subsequent party, Jenny and Richard found that the housewives of their rich neighbors and friends were all "girls" of Mrs. Tus. Jack, who arrived late, recognized Mrs. Tuse at the party, and he was killed …
Compared with the rural story of London in Cooper’s original work, Albee’s Garden of Desire deepens and strengthens the revelation and torture of human nature and living conditions in modern society with a typical American middle-class life scene. For example, in Cooper’s original play, the couple didn’t see books and paintings in their indoor furnishings, while in Albee’s Broadway "Garden of Desire", not only a few oil paintings were hung indoors, but also books were filled on shelves covering a whole wall. This makes the audience have to face up to it: in a money world with moral collapse, intellectuals as social conscience are equally depraved and crazy. This is undoubtedly a mirror of the present China society.
This character, renamed Mrs Tus by Albee, was a Polish Jewish woman who survived the Nazi concentration camp in Cooper’s original play and made a living as a pimp for bored middle-class British housewives. Albee turned her into a headstrong and ruthless businesswoman who organized prostitution in new york, deliberately hiding her life story to highlight her evil symbol. In Cooper’s play, Jenny advertised for a job and attracted Mrs. Tus; In Albee’s play, Jenny’s neighbor girlfriend revealed Jenny’s financial difficulties to Mrs. Tus.
The biggest controversy in this play lies in the unpunished murder in the play. Some critics think that Albee should delete the murder plot in the adaptation, so as not to fall into the murder convention of the structural reasoning play and weaken its social critical significance. Time magazine thinks that murder is "too sensational, as if the corruption and collapse of moral values only mean death". Albee keeps the plot of murder, but unlike Cooper, he hopes that his Garden of Desire is more than just a social drama to explore the moral culture of the middle class in American society. Death in Cooper’s works is a one-dimensional realism, while death in Albee’s works is a symbol.
Albee’s Garden of Desire is no longer an isolated murder story, it reveals the moral and spiritual collapse and degeneration of a flashy society as a whole; It condemned the murder of humanity and humanity in this defeated society. Over the past 50 years, among more than 30 plays created by Albee, four have been adapted: The Garden of Desire, Malcolm, The Sad Cafe Song and Lolita in the 1980s. He once criticized the shoddy adaptation of many screenwriters on the American stage. "Most of these works adapted from European novels and scripts are clumsy, distorted and worthless, but people should not forget that many plays by playwrights Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Giraudoux and Anouilh are their adaptations … Drama adaptation can be a respected profession and a very important artistic act."
Albee believes that successful screenwriters should not only retell and express the story of the original, but also use the original as a springboard to explain their unique views. Just like electra, Sophocles, euripides, Giraudoux and Hoffman Shtal have their own unique forms and contents. Playwrights have their own interpretations of the original, and the story of the original is only a catalyst for their artistic conception. Before Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, The History of King Lear was staged in the Elizabethan era. In this early version, King Lear did not go crazy, but returned to the throne two or three years later and died peacefully. If Shakespeare was trapped in the story and thought of the original play, there would be no unparalleled Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear today.
