Fragments

by Edward Albee

Overview

Several people sit together reading proverbs aloud to each other. From these proverbs are prompted stories of each one's past, or musings surrounding life-long mysteries. Each tries to tell about some incident which they hope will illuminate their own being; hoping the others will understand who they are. Each story flows to the next, with a musical quality to the randomness. Albee explains it this way: "FRAGMENTS lacks plot in any established sense; there is no clear dilemma and resolution�no 'story,' no apparent sequentially. The piece proceeds as a piece of music does�accumulating, accumulating, following its own logic. Its effectiveness, its coherence reside in what we have experienced from the totality of it. FRAGMENTS is also a very simple, straightforward piece�on its own terms, of course."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822214212
Publisher:	Dramatists Play Service, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/01/1995
Product dimensions:	52.50(w) x 77.50(h) x 2.50(d)

About the Author

American dramatist Edward Albee was born in 1928. Three of his plays— A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women— received Pulitzer Prizes, and his most famous, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was adapted to a movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. His other plays include The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, Tiny Alice, All Over, Listening, The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Finding the Sun, Fragments, Marriage Play, The Lorca Play and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? He died in 2016.

Editorial Reviews

This is a play for audiences who like people on bar stools and poems on cuffs. And can remain amused and detached at their own predestined doom.

NY Post

...FRAGMENTS reminds us of Albee's skill at using language to create drama within drama...Albee's language once again carves eloquent images...By the end of these fragments, Albee achieves a composite of human experience that touches us.

TheaterWeek