The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee

Stephen Bottoms is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies and Director of the Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds. He is the author of The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge, 1998), Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Cambridge, 2000), and Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement. He has also edited Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, and has published articles on a wide variety of topics in a number of scholarly journals. In 2004 his article 'The Efficacy-Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy' (Theatre Topics, September 2003), was nominated for the ATHE prize.

'… highly recommended for all libraries acquiring materials on literature and the theatre in English.' Reference Reviews

• List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgements; Notes on the text; Chronology; 1. Introduction: the man who had three lives Stephen Bottoms; 2. Albee's early one-act plays: 'A new American playwright from whom much is to be expected' Philip C. Kolin; 3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: toward the marrow Matthew Roudané; 4. 'Withered age and stale custom': marriage, diminution, and sex in Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance, and Finding the Sun John M. Clum; 5. Albee's 3 1/2: the Pulitzer plays Thomas P. Adler; 6. Albee's threnodies: Box-Mao-Box, All Over, The Lady from Dubuque, and Three Tall Women Brenda Murphy; 7. Minding the play: thought and feeling in Albee's 'hermetic' works Gerry McCarthy; 8. Albee's monster children: adaptations and confrontations Stephen Bottoms; 9. 'Better alert than numb': Albee since the eighties Christopher Bigsby; 10. Albee stages Marriage Play: cascading action, audience taste, and dramatic paradox Rakesh H. Solomon; 11. 'Playing the cloud circuit': Albee's vaudeville show Linda Ben-Zvi; 12. Albee's The Goat: rethinking tragedy for the 21st century J. Ellen Gainor; 13. 'Words; words … They're such a pleasure' (An Afterword) Ruby Cohn; 14. Borrowed time: an interview with Edward Albee Stephen Bottoms; Notes on further reading; Select bibliography; Index.