1. Born on 12 March 1928 and adopted by affluent parents two weeks later, Edward Albee’s childhood and adolescence were marked by almost constant problems with authority. Having twice been expelled from school, why was he then also expelled from college in 1947?

   1. For smoking cannabis

   2. For distributing lewd articles about the dean

   3. For skipping classes

   4. For public nudity

2. Albee’s breakthrough play, The Zoo Story, was initially turned down by every theatre in New York, before receiving its premiere in Berlin in 1959. It was finally produced off-Broadway the following year in a double bill with which play?

   1. Sweet Bird of Youth by Tennesee Williams

   2. The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

   3. Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco

   4. Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

3. The Zoo Story concerns two men, Peter and Jerry, who get talking on a park bench. What is its famously shocking ending?

   1. Peter kills and eats Jerry’s dog

   2. Jerry tricks Peter into killing him

   3. Jerry seduces Peter in the bushes

   4. Peter defecates on stage

4. Where did Albee first come across the phrase 'Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', which became the title of his best known play?

   1. It was a headline in the Village Voice

   2. He heard the child of one of his college professors singing it

   3. He saw it written in soap on the mirror of a men’s toilet

   4. He saw it formed by chance in the crumpled pages of a college magazine

5. Edward Albee has won three Pulitzer prizes, for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women. With what still rarer honour did the Pulitzer board recognise Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

   1. They awarded it the Golden Pulitzer, a discretionary category, now discontinued, for works that showed “especially outstanding merit”

   2. They rejected it on grounds of vulgarity, despite the play being recommended by the advisory committee, preferring to award no drama prize at all that year

   3. They misspelled both his name (as “Albey) and the play (as “Virginia Wolf”) in the citation

   4. Two board members admitted that it should have won, but a postal strike delayed the manuscript’s arrival until after the deadline for submissions

6. The presence in the script of which two words, to describe sexual congress, were a source of great controversy when the film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was released in 1966?

   1. Bang and screw

   2. Screw and fuck

   3. Fuck and bang

   4. Screw and hump

7. Besides his great successes, Albee is also famous for some spectacular flops, most notably his all-star Broadway adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. How long did it run for?

   1. Two weeks, by then there were more actors on the stage than people in the audience

   2. Two nights. Reviews were so bad after the first, and bookings so weak after the second, that the show was abandoned

   3. It never started. After four previews, the producer insisted that the show was so bad that he would never let the critics see it

   4. Just one rehearsal, during which Mary Tyler Moore, who was playing Holly Golightly, was taken ill. By the time she returned, the show had been cancelled

8. What is unusual about Leslie and Sarah, the couple in Albee’s 1975 play Seascape?

   1. They are lizards

   2. They think that everybody else is a lizard

   3. They only eat lizards, prepared in a variety of ways

   4. They have adopted a baby lizard as their legal child

9. First performed in 1987, Marriage Play tells the story of Jack, and his frustrated attempts to leave his wife Gillian. What, among other things, does he discover that she has been doing?

   1. Running a brothel in their garage

   2. Building a robot husband to replace him

   3. Cloning herself

   4. Keeping detailed notes about their sex life

10. Albee is generally considered to be America’s leading exponent of absurdist theatre. Which of the following does not occur in one of his plays?

    1. A man falls in love with a goat

    2. A woman is split into several versions of herself at different ages

    3. A man grows a third arm

    4. A woman plans to set up home inside her own hat

Solutions

1:C, 2:D, 3:B, 4:C, 5:B, 6:D, 7:C, 8:A, 9:D, 10:D

Scores

1. 3 and above.

   'I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour,' wrote Albee. I'm afraid your performance was utterly ridiculous – and not remotely funny.

2. 7 and above.

   'A play is fiction,' wrote Albee, 'and fiction is fact distilled into truth.' Truth is, your Albee knowledge could do with a little fine-tuning.

3. 10 and above.

   'Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly,' wrote Albee. You've obviously taken the direct route to a fine working knowledge of the man, however – well done!