Edward Albee, still playing rough

Edward Albee will be the first to tell you that playwrights who refuse to compromise may never become rich.

And after watching and listening to students at Emerson College hang on his words during a speech last week on the state of American theater, as well as in a more informal master class the next morning, it wouldn't be surprising if more than a few of them were willing to take a vow of poverty.

He seems to genuinely enjoy his contacts with young would-be artists, for whom he sees some hope of salvation from lives of pedantry and pandering. And they in turn seem to be energized by spending time in the company of a man whose work seems to prove that youthful idealism need not degenerate into cheesy screenplays and stock portfolios.

"Be masters," he tells budding playwrights, "not servants."

"Playwrights shouldn't be employees," he adds. "You're there to be a leader, a teacher."

Quick to smile, Albee delivers these messages with understated humor, recalling a stand-up comic playing with his audience more than a hectoring evangelist. In the middle of making a point, he'll stop speaking. "You know, it occurred to me the other day, I was never breast-fed," he'll say. Allowing just the right amount of time for laughs, he'll add, "That will probably lead to a lot of scholarly papers."

"What's the best way of dealing with audience expectations?" he'll be asked. Forget them. Write work that interests you. It's an unfortunate trend, he says, that audiences think they know what they should see, and theater companies and playwrights respond.

Albee, who will probably be 76 on Friday (he was adopted and is unsure of the birthdate), would seem closer to a lion in winter than an elder statesman, except that he still cuts a rather youthful figure, whether in sportcoat and tie or black leather jacket.

Nor has his message or his writing been damped down by age. Albee still seems very much the iconoclast who burst out of the Greenwich Village scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s to establish himself as the American maestro of the theater of the absurd. His plays are still absurdist in style, even if that isn't the fashion.

And while you can take the boy out of the Village, you can't take New York out of the boy. The city still seems like one big artistic and intellectual community listening to him talk. He'll wax rhapsodic about the Village Voice or a New Yorker piece in which Steve Martin satirizes Mel Gibson and "The Passion of the Christ." In an interview after his speech, he gently interrupts a question with a "Where is Spalding?" about the disappearance of Spalding Gray, or a "poor `Doc' Simon" concerning recent negative reviews of Neil Simon.

Not that Albee is any stranger to such reviews, nor any friend to those who write them. He still speaks with distaste about longtime critic and former American Repertory Theatre artistic director Robert Brustein ("an enemy from the beginning"), even though Brustein has written more favorably about his work lately.

Speaking to a master class about the difference between plays and movies, he says, "You can take a deaf person to a movie; you can't take a blind person. You can take a blind person to a play; you can't take a deaf person," and then adds, "except a critic" before playfully sticking his tongue out at a representative of the fourth estate in the room. For my part, it was a combination of seeing the 1966 movie "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," going to David Wheeler's Theatre Company of Boston production of "Tiny Alice," and studying "The Zoo Story" and "An American Dream" in an introductory theater class in 1967 that convinced me to switch majors from journalism to English. So it's easy to identify with the pull that Albee seems to have on college students.

That pull has probably intensified since 1991 as Albee has reestablished his reputation as one of the great living playwrights with the Pulitzer-Prize winning "Three Tall Women," "The Play About the Baby," and the Tony-winning "The Goat or Who is Sylvia." Not everyone loved the last two plays, but even his harshest critics during the 1980s, when he fell out of favor, cannot easily dismiss his recent work.

And now, says Albee, critics are starting to come around to plays they once dismissed as they are remounted; such was the case with Hartford Stage's revival of "Tiny Alice" in 1998.

Hartford Stage, under Michael Wilson, has been Albee's primary champion in New England. Neither the Huntington Theatre Company nor the ART has ever produced one of his plays, although Stephen Rowe put a series of excerpts together into "Albee's Men" at the ART in 1998.

Although Albee was not enamored of Hartford's version of "Seascape" in 2002 ("I think it's a more serious play than they did"), he speaks fondly of that company's upcoming world premiere of "Peter and Jerry." In this production, opening in May, the 1958 one-act "The Zoo Story" will be Act II, in which Jerry, an angry young man, verbally confronts Peter, a solid, middle-class citizen. In the new first act, "Home Life," Albee focuses on what happened to Peter at home with his wife before he left for the park.

"I thought I had created a three-dimensional character in Jerry," he says, "but I kept coming back to Peter."

Has he wanted to revisit any of his other characters, like George and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "No, I thought I had dealt with them completely in that play," he says.

The confrontation between someone on the edge and a representative of the middle class could describe Albee's own feelings about the playwright's responsibility, which could almost be reduced to: Afflict the comfortable.

"Each play is an act of aggression against the status quo," he said in his speech. "Too many playwrights let the audience off the hook instead of slugging them in the face, which is what you should be doing," he told the master class.

It may surprise people who see his plays as abstract and detached that he is an intensely political person: "I think all my plays are political. I think all art is corrective in showing us how to lead our lives more fully."

Part of living life more fully, he believes (and it probably won't surprise you to learn), is removing the current president, whom he loathes even more than critics: "I don't know why people aren't in the streets about what's happening." In fact, the openly gay playwright even shakes his head at the push for same-sex marriage. "I think gay marriage is a problem. It's an issue that the forces of darkness will use to their advantage."

Corrective he may be, but didactic he is not, he tells the Emerson audience, except for "The Death of Bessie Smith" in 1959, which grew out of his rage at racism. "The Goat," which deals with a middle-class man's love of a barnyard animal, is a playful but serious look at the whole notion of tolerance in America.

"The Goat" will probably end the drought of major Boston-area companies performing Albee. The Huntington is talking about staging the play next year, and if it decides not to, the Lyric Stage Company probably will. Rob Orchard, executive director at the ART, says there is nothing standing in the way of its doing Albee, either.

"We have great regard and respect for him," said Orchard. "If the right director came along who was interested in one of his plays and the piece seemed to fit the company, it would make a lot of sense. He's an extraordinary writer."

And these are extraordinary times for Albee. He may have warned budding playwrights that audiences don't have the patience for a three-act play anymore. But after a meteoric rise and then being left for dead by critics, Edward Albee's third act has been as complete a triumph as there is in the theater.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.

Who's afraid of a master class?

In a master class with students at Emerson College, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee continued to try to lead students toward art and danger and away from commerce and safety. Here is some of his advice:

"If you do what you know you can do, you'll always do less."

"Don't write about yourself very much. . . . I'm one of the few people who think `The Glass Menagerie' would have been a better play without Tom. . . . The more you invent, the more freedom you have to get to the truths you're after."

"Discover what kind of a writer you are. Sam Beckett and Chekhov were the only two writers who could write prose and plays. . . . Arthur Miller wrote one novel. Don't read it."

"Study painting and sculpture to learn about the visual elements of plays. Listen to classical music [to learn about timing and punctuation, so] a play can be conducted" by the director.

"Everything you write should be inevitable."

ED SIEGEL