East Hampton - This past Thursday, July 21, a well-worn and world-weary Edward Albee offered a packed audience at East Hampton's Guild Hall direct insight into his creative sensibility. "A Delicate Balance" was the second selection of Guild Hall's Red Carpet Film Series, starring Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield, and marked Albee's first of three Pulitzer Prize wins in 1966. The film is eerily suited to the glass houses and high hedges evocative of a certain demographic on the East End, and Albee is no stranger to Guild Hall, having served as the theatre's creative director in the summer of 1972. His countenance was stately and warm, with only fleeting traces of the inflated ego his press personality suggests.

"If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well that's their problem as much as it is mine," said Albee in a 1966 interview published in The Paris Review.

Long heralded as the premiere authorial zeitgeist of the American family institution, scourging and scouring the illusions, delusions, and unmet expectations inherent to philistine living and dilettante dreams, Albee sat for a slew of probing questions at the whims of his then tumultuous lover, composer William Flanagan. Amidst the backdrop of a Henry Moore sculpture at his ocean-side Montauk home, with the imposing shadow of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" hovering since its premiere in 1962, something like tension - be it resentful, erotic, or both - lingered beneath their pin-sharp dialogue, and descriptions of Albee's "uncomfortable" appearance, his "ungroomed informality." Flanagan's preoccupation with Albee's string of commercial failures was pitted against the playwright's ruminations of artistic integrity, repudiation of overworked jargon like "Absurdist Theatre," and self-aggrandizement in the face of precocious critics, who crafted conclusions like angry toddlers adamant about coloring inside the lines. From the sound of the words on the page, a romantic feud seemed imminent following the click of the tape recorder.

"I don't like the climate in which writer's have to work in this country, and I think it's my responsibility to talk about it," Albee said in response to Flanagan's recounting of a critic's claim that "Virginia Woolf" was about four disguised homosexuals, a stretch the poet-turned-playwright derides as being crafted upon "arbitrary Freudian guesswork."

"I would be fascinated to read an intelligent paper documenting from the text that 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is play written about for homosexuals. It might instruct me about the deep slag pits of my subconscious."

(Courtesy Photo: Binghampton University)

What the public did not know, but may have suspected at the time of the interview, was that Albee is in fact a homosexual, a detail he was no doubt keenly conscious of. But in 1966, he had plenty to be defensive about. His previous play, "Tiny Alice" (1964) was a critical flop on the New York theatre circuit, and the film adaptation of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" was recast moments after the ink dried on the contract selling the film rights to Harry Warner. Originally, the appropriately aged Bette Davis was cast for the role of Martha. However, the next morning, courtesy of Variety newsprint, Albee found himself swindled for box-office babe, Elizabeth Taylor. Then there were the "schizophrenic deviations to The Roadhouse," which obstructed "the claustrophobia of the living room." Not to mention the "movie music" which "told you how to feel."

His disdain and dismissal of critics - from Frank Rich to Leslie Fielder and nearly everyone else on The New York Times reviewer's masthead - has followed him throughout his career, and is reflected in the nature of his works themselves. His characters, under the artifice of naturalism, deviate from understandable tenets of waking reality, with unclear motives, and philosophical spines as opaque as two-way mirrors. Like real individuals, their three-dimensionality eludes description. Sometimes people really are just absurd, in the true sense of the word.

"Quite often, I suppose in most of my plays, people are doing things on two or three different levels at the same time," he said before Flanagan in 1966. And the same holds true of both his characters and his outward demeanor - the intensity behind his eyes, the mischievous confidence with which he addresses a room. At age 83, his wit is as sharper than a scalpel, and more disconcerting at that.

"This movie is infinitely better than 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'" he said as he assumed his position on the stage following the screening. "There were two times when even I was moved. How do you get moved by something you yourself wrote?" he announced, as the audience chuckled with approval.

As is the way of Albee's world, there is chaos beneath the civility of "A Delicate Balance." The story is somewhat formulaic in its construction - a wealthy family, unspoken melancholy, and torment operating beneath a guise of a uniquely aristocratic sense of propriety. Then there is the alcohol, catalyzing the slow descent into emotional disorientation as the rhythm of the play's dialogue fires onward with increased fervor. Apologies functioned to self-fortify rather than to attain forgiveness, a clouded attempt at protection against the judgments of others. One got the sense that every pause was sacrosanct. Hepburn shines in the role of Agnes, the matriarch of the house, sudden vibrations in her voice and body revealing remnants of her alleged battle with Parkinson's, perfectly suited for the precarious loss of control that undercuts every smile and well-quipped aphorism her character lets slip from her mouth. Scofield mirrors this excellence, the ineffectual patriarch to her penetrating appeals, with resignation worn on his face as deep as the wrinkles across his forehead. Not to mention scene-stealing Kate Reid as the role of Claire, an alcoholic by merit of "willfulness."

"A Delicate Balance" (1966) marked the first of Albee's three Pulitzer Prizes, not to mention seven Tony Award nominations and two wins. (Courtesy Photo: Listal.com

Reid was an impromptu replacement for theatre legend, Kim Stanley, one and a half weeks into a staggeringli-swift three-week rehearsal process, Albee offered audience members at the screening.

"Katharine Hepburn threatened to quit because Kim Stanley was not memorizing her lines, and was improvising all over the place," he said. "By the time Kate [Reid] landed in London, she knew the first half of the play."

Despite the ominous sense of reverence that pervaded the room during the screening of the film, one could feel the audience slip into a confused restlessness in the final act.

"I don't understand," a woman uttered as Lee Remick, starring as Hepburn and Scoffield's daughter, appeared hysterical on screen with a gun. Another couple squabbled to the exit during the film's final scene. By the time the question and answer section commenced, a wave of interest pricked the room's attention when one brave moviegoer asked, "What are two or three things that this film is about?"

Albee sighed. The audience laughed.

"It's not that I'm trying to be unpleasant. But these are my answers," he stated.

"The play is about two and a quarter hours long. And it's about everything that happens to the characters before the play begins, as well as everything that happens to them during the play, as well as everything that happens to them after the play ends."

Critics, let the Freudian guesswork begin.

For more information on Guild Hall's Red Carpet Film Series, sponsored by the AR Landsman Foundation, call 631-324-4050, or visit the box office at 158 Main Street, East Hampton.