The Edward Albee Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2026 Comparative Drama Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 9-11. The session titles are “Roundtable: Publications and Conference in Celebration of Edward Albee’s Centenary in 2028” (in person) and “Albee in Comparison: Transnational Contexts and Continuities” (virtual).
1) Roundtable: Publications and Conference in Celebration of Edward Albee’s Centenary in 2028
Timeline:
Michael Y. Bennett (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) will discuss two major publications he is editing for the Centenary. 10 minutes
David A. Crespy (University of Missouri-Columbia) will discuss his Albee biography focusing on the third act of Albee’s career and life. 10 minutes
Lincoln Konkle (The College of New Jersey) will discuss EAS’s preliminary plans for a three-day academic conference to be held in New York City, March 10-12, 2028. 10 minutes
Toby Zinman (University of the Arts) will discuss the topic of one session we are planning for the centenary conference: Albee and Art. 10 minutes
Questions and Answers: 20 minutes
2) Albee in Comparison: Transnational Contexts and Continuities
This panel explores Edward Albee’s plays in transnational perspective, examining how his dramaturgy resonates with, contrasts, and dialogues with playwrights from diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. It highlights continuities, adaptations, and critical exchanges that have shaped modern and contemporary theater across the 20th century.
Abstracts:
Gaining Loss: Resonances of Edward Albee’s Poetics of Assault in Leilah Assumpção’s Theater
Dr. Esther Marinho Santana, University of São Paulo
In 1969, Brazil entered the darkest phase of the civil-military dictatorship initiated five years earlier. As institutional censorship intensified and dissent was violently suppressed, the theatrical scene paradoxically experienced a surge of creativity with the emergence of the so-called “1969 Generation”, a cohort of young playwrights debuting in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Among them was Leilah Assumpção, whose work exemplifies the group’s shared characteristics: short, tense plays centered on two antagonist characters, immersed in turbulent encounters culminating in sudden aggression. Among the factors contributing to their dramaturgical convergence was the fruitful career of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story on Brazilian stages throughout the 1960s (Santana, 2020).
This paper examines the resonances between Albee’s 1959 one-act play and Assumpção’s Fala baixo, senão eu grito (Keep Your Voice Down or I’ll Scream). An analysis of intertextual echoes reveals how Assumpção’s dramaturgy absorbs and adapts the tensions of Albee’s work – and what I term its poetics of assault – to articulate its own aesthetics of metatheatrical confrontation and salvific provocation. This study thus argues that, although produced in markedly different contexts, both plays mobilize aggression as a performative gesture of rupture and redemption, ultimately positioning destruction as an ambivalent yet potentially transcendent pathway to individual liberation.
Voices That Fracture the Real: Edward Albee and Sevim Burak in a Transnational Dialogue
Dr. Mehmet Zeki Giritli, Koç University-Istanbul
This paper places Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in conversation with Turkish playwright Sevim Burak’s Sahibinin Sesi (His Master’s Voice) and explores how modernist theatre challenges realist conventions across distinct cultural and historical contexts. Sevim Burak (1931-1983) is regarded as one of the most radical and innovative figures in modern Turkish literature and theatre. Her dramaturgy breaks away from conventional dramatic structure, psychological realism, and linear narrative, embracing fragmented voices, shifting identities, and non-mimetic forms. While Albee tears down the psychological realism of the American domestic sphere, Burak disrupts narrative coherence in post-imperial Istanbul. Both playwrights highlight language as a site of disintegration, a means of uncommunication and instability, and challenge the limits of realist representation through fractured dialogue, unstable identities, and violence embedded in everyday speech. Through a close reading of both plays, this paper argues that Burak’s radical theatricality reveals a non-Western experimental dramaturgy that resonates with, yet challenges Albee’s aesthetics.
Domestic Conflict and Cultural Mediation: Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Paso’s Un matrimonio muy muy muy feliz
Vicente Chacón-Carmona, University of Seville
This paper examines the parallels between Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Alfonso Paso’s Un matrimonio muy muy muy feliz (1968). Both dramatists stage the domestic sphere as a site of psychological violence, illusion, and emotional exhaustion, yet they do so under profoundly different social and aesthetic regimes. While Albee’s play dissects the American dream through linguistic cruelty and the exposure of marital fictions, Paso’s comedy transforms similar conflicts into bourgeois farce, where excess emotion is defused by irony and humor. Written under Franco’s censorship, Un matrimonio muy muy muy feliz reframes marital despair within the boundaries of moral respectability, converting existential trauma into satire.
By comparing dialogue patterns, character dynamics, and tonal shifts, this paper explores how Albee’s modernist tension becomes Paso’s domestic containment, revealing the transnational migration of dramatic motifs across ideological borders. The study contends that Paso’s play, rather than imitating Albee, offers a localized rearticulation of the same anxieties about truth, performance, and emotional authenticity within the Spanish cultural climate of the late 1960s.
Ageing In Time: Harold Pinter’s Landscape (1969) and Edward Albee’s Listening (1976)
Antonia Tsamouris, ‘Deree’-The American College of Greece
According to the theory of Phenomenology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “all our experiences, inasmuch as they are ours, arrange themselves in terms of before and after” (476). The philosopher highlights the importance of subjectivity, for every human being, in relation to time. Nonetheless, temporality poses the question of ageing, as one’s misconception of the older self may lead towards a “méconnaissance” of the present one. As Leni Marshall wonders, people, in the course of time, often feel estranged from the image of their past self. Marshall argues on the role of temporality in ageing, as the humane body becomes a site indicating the passing of time, while memory plays crucial role.
This paper will examine time, temporality and the importance of bodily spatiality in ageing, by comparing and analysing two plays, written only a few years apart, by Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, respectively.
The Nobel Prize writer, Harold Pinter, depicted with his playwriting his immense interest in time. In his “Memory plays”, written during this period, Pinter highlights his preoccupation with memory, ageing, space and temporality. In Landscape (1968) Pinter placed a man and a woman in a timeless setting, talking about the past and the present. Some years later, Edward Albee wrote Listening (1976), in which a middle-aged man and a woman, and a younger woman, discuss memory, subjectivity and time. Both plays, first presented on radio, focus on the perception of time, as a cognitive procedure, though indissoluble linked to the subject’s image. As Merleau-Ponty underlines, “to analyse time” one needs to “gain access, through time, to [the] concrete structure” of the subject, which entails its image, as the “idea of the subject” (477).
For more details about the 2026 Comparative Drama Conference, please visit the University of Wisconsin-Madison website.
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