The zoo story

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Names: Carolina Barrera Code: 2007234006
Andrés Pérez Code: 2008234039
Deiber Monroy Code: 2008234033

Edward Albee

Edward Albee was born Edward Harvey in Washington, D.C. At the age of two weeks, he was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Reed Albee of Larchmont, New York, andrenamed Edward Franklin Albee III. From an early age, Edward Albee knew that he was adopted, but he has never attempted to locate his birth parents.

Through his family's business, Edward Albee was exposed to the theater at an early age and developed a passionate love for the arts, but his adoptive parents expected him to pursue a more conventional business or professional career. From thebeginning, he found himself at odds with his adoptive family over their expectations for him and his own artistic ambitions.

He was expelled from two private schools before graduating from Choate, and dropped out of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut midway through his sophomore year. At 20, he broke with his family and moved to Greenwich Village. He never saw his father again, and would not seehis mother for 17 years.

For the next decade, Albee lived off of a small inheritance from his grandmother, supplemented by a succession of odd jobs, such as one delivering telegrams for Western Union. Enthralled with the artistic ferment of Manhattan in the 1950s, he absorbed every innovation in art, music, literature and the theater. After unsuccessful experiments with poetry and fiction, hefinally found his calling in writing for the theater.

At age 30, he completed his first major work, The Zoo Story. The play received its world premiere in Berlin, Germany in 1959, and opened Off-Broadway the following year. This startling one-act, in which a loquacious drifter meets a conventional family man on a park bench and provokes him to violence, won Albee an international reputation as afearless observer of human alienation. Albee brought absurd to the American stage with his one-act plays The Sandbox and The American Dream. In the same period, he dramatized America's simmering racial conflict in a more conventionally realistic short drama, The Death of Bessie Smith.

Inside his works most recognize we can find:

- The Sandbox (1959)

- Fam and Yam (1959)

-The American Dream (1960)

- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961–1962)

- The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963) (adapted from the novella by Carson McCullers)

- Tiny Alice (1964)

- Malcolm (1965) (adapted from the novel by James Purdy)(1974)

- Lolita (adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov) (1981)

- The Man Who Had Three Arms (1981)

- Peter & Jerryretitled in 2009 as At Home at the Zoo (Act One: Homelife. Act Two: The Zoo Story) (2004)

- Me, Myself and I (2007)

- At Home At The Zoo (2009)

Edward Albee has got several distinctions for his work as: three prizes Pulitzer of drama, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972. On the other hand, he received a Special Tony Award for LifetimeAchievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996).

Nowadays, he is a distinguished professor at the University of Houston , where he teaches an exclusive playwriting course.

Historical and social context:

This kind of art based his work on theexistential philosophy combined with extremely dramatic elements that has only aim, to show a world that is impossible to explain logically since as well some writers indicate... This world is very absurd!

The elements of the theatre of the absurd begin to appear shortly after the Greek drama had great summit. This kind of theatre was evident in the works of Aristófanes. Not only in Greece, but...