He’s dead, the Playwrite who created the Backdrop of Psychological Chaos that left Alfred Hitchcock looking like the British Walt Disney. We knew he was there, we, in the know, knew he made the Unbearable Wall that was an insult to The Human Psyche. Albee was the deplorable Puppet Master. He was our Frankenstein who made deplorable monsters. None was more deplorable than Martha. Her scratching and screeching was the castrator that goes bump in the night. Now, she is dead, too, replaced by a legion of Teen Tweeters who have nothing to say, nothing to fight for, nothing to destroy a man over. Alas, the long Cold War is over.
I suspected Liz was kin to my mother Rosemary when I saw THAT MOVIE. There’s my Mom, sucking on a cigarette plotting her next move, working overtime on her beloved vendetta. Rosemary had this weird laugh, that turned into a Choking Croaking Gurgle as she began to die of lung cancer. Albee was Cancer. He understood America was dying of cancer. No one cared until Eisenhower became President. Now we cared about Cancer and the building of the Berlin Wall. We would chain smoke cigarettes as we watched one grey figure after another – break for the wall! We were fighting over a damn wall, like a bench in Central Park. Women wearing all the clothes they owned under a heavy coat, topped with a bleak scarf, got guillotined on barbed wire before our eyes.
Meanwhile in a Gothic House on the grounds of an Ivy League College, Martha does her thing. The East Berliners want to come to America and do her thing, too. Albee was a Social Cancer Stick. He drove nails in our coffin. He had his Laughs, and now he is dead. His infamous bench will be auctioned off at Southeby’s for sixty million dollars. There will be a bidding war.
Rosemary died a bitter woman because she had no more Cocktails Parties to conquer. Every day was D-Day for Rosemary. She couldn’t handle the Cold War, the idea that her four beautiful children could be taken out in a flash. So, she deliberately hated us, so we wouldn’t be missed.
All we Teens cared about was Top Ten Radio. Would the Coasters have another huge hit? It looked like the Duke of Earl could not be topped. Some of us shop-lifted Zippo lighter fluid from the Rexall Drug Store in order to get high. We thought we were going to be seriously deranged for a long time to come. But, we are no longer, bad. We watch Cops and love that young woman’s quick answer to the officer’s question.
“How much have you had to drink tonight?”
“Not enough!”
Jon Presco
In between, Mr. Albee (his name is pronounced AWL-bee) turned out a parade of works, 30 or so in all, generally focused on exposing the darkest secrets of relatively well-to-do people, with lacerating portrayals of familial relations, social intercourse and individual soul-searching.
As Ben Brantley of The New York Times once wrote, “Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone: the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death.”
His work could be difficult to absorb, not only tough-minded but elliptical or opaque, and his relationships with ticket-buyers, who only intermittently made his plays into hits, and critics, who were disdainful as often as they were laudatory, ran hot and cold.
In 1965, after “Tiny Alice,” his drama about Christian faith, money and the ethics of worship opened on Broadway, causing much consternation and even outrage among critics whohad failed to discern meaning in its murky symbols and suggestions of mysticism, Mr. Albee attended anews conference ostensibly to discuss the play but ended up lecturing on the subject of criticism.
http://www.the-berlin-wall.com/videos/peter-fechter-dies-trying-to-escape-542/
Rosamond Press 
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