A few months ago while lunching at Sardi’s, Broadway press agent Sam Rudy looked around at the caricatures of theater people lining the walls and wondered if there was one of his longtime client Edward Albee. Rudy checked in with Sardi’s co-owner Max Klimavicius and was startled to learn that, somehow, the man who wrote “The Zoo Story,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “A Delicate Balance” never made it onto Sardi’s walls of fame. The restaurant swiftly corrected the oversight. On March 13, one day after Albee turned 88, Sardi’s unveiled the playwright’s portrait at a small ceremony hosted by Elizabeth I. McCann and Daryl Roth, co-producers of several Albee plays including “Three Tall Women” and “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” The “unveiling” was the best show I’ve been to in a long time. McCann personally selected the guests, all of whom, she noted, had a personal connection to Albee. He couldn’t be there, unfortunately, because he was under the weather. But among those on hand were Angela Lansbury, one of his favorite actresses, who in the ’70s starred in “All Over” in London and in the underrated “Counting the Ways” in Hartford, Conn.; André Bishop, who, as head of Lincoln Center, produced the Tony-winning revival of “A Delicate Balance” starring Elaine Stritch and George Grizzard; Mercedes Ruehl, who starred in “The Goat”; and playwright John Guare. Roth had the inspired idea of going around the room and asking everyone for an anecdote. Playwright Terrence McNally is probably Albee’s oldest friend. He recalled crashing a party in 1959 while he was a student at Columbia University. Albee was there and, as the party wound down in the wee hours of the morning, offered to give him a ride home. Then he invited him up for a drink. McNally thought, “It’s so late — won’t his wife mind?” “Shows you how good my gaydar was back then,” McNally said. McNally also recalled how he and Albee, who’d just written “The Zoo Story,” attended a play starring Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead wanted to meet Albee after the show. “So you’re the young man who wrote that play about the animals!” she said. “Edward was not happy,” McNally said. Director Pam MacKinnon remembered the phone message she received from Albee the day after she won the Tony in 2013, for her terrific revival of “Virginia Woolf.” “Will you marry me?” Albee asked. “Please say no.” Terrence McNally.Photo: Andy Kropa/Invision/AP Actor John Procaccino recalled the time he went to an art gallery with Albee, who has a superb collection of modern art. Procaccino liked one painting. Albee examined it and said, “Not very interesting. Not much going on.” He came back to it later, however, and changed his mind. “Buy it now,” he told Procaccino, “before the price hits $40,000.” Newsday critic Linda Winer became friends with Albee after she went back to “The Goat” for a second time and revised her initial mixed review. She admitted in print that she was wrong, that the play was in fact terrific. Albee, who took his share of beatings from critics over the years, admired her honesty. He invited her to his estate in Montauk, where he was preparing to bury his beloved cat. “The cat was in the freezer, the gravedigger was in the yard, and the critic was in the kitchen,” Winer said. “It was just like an Edward Albee play.” I was invited because I met Albee when I was a college freshman in 1985, and took a theater class he taught one semester. This was during a period he called his “wilderness years,” when, after several Broadway flops, he couldn’t get a play produced in New York. We took a train from Grand Central to Rye, NY, one afternoon. I was visiting some friends. He was visiting his adoptive mother, who lived in an apartment above the Westchester Country Club. He invited me up for a drink, and I remember thinking his mother’s apartment was frozen in time in about 1955. She was ill, and didn’t come out of her bedroom. Years later, when I saw “Three Tall Women,” I realized the set was identical to her apartment. “Three Tall Women” was the play that resurrected Albee’s career. Jordan Baker, who played the youngest of the three, told me about working with Myra Carter, another of Albee’s favorite actresses. She played the oldest woman in the play. Carter, who died in January, frequently said during rehearsals, “Nobody wants to see a f - - king Albee play! He’s not in vogue anymore. He’s not in vogue. Nobody cares.” After the play opened to rave reviews, she said to Albee, “You’re going to win another f - - king Pulitzer Prize!” And he did, his third. The original Broadway cast of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”Po: Joan Marcus “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” will close at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Sept. 4 after 800 performances, the producers announced Tuesday. That makes it the longest running non-musical play since “Proof” closed in 2003. “Curious Incident” recouped its $4.75 million investment in January 2015 after just four months on Broadway. Sources say it will turn a tidy profit of nearly $3 million by the end of its run. Which goes to show you that not every play has to have a star above the title to succeed on Broadway. If the play’s the thing, the cash register will ring!
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