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Counting the Ways and Listening: Two Plays
Counting the Ways and Listening: Two Plays
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Author: Edward Albee Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Format: Softcover # of Pages: 72 Pub. Date: 1978 ISBN-10: 0822202425 ISBN-13: 9780822202424
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About
the Play:
Counting the Ways has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.
The volume Counting the Ways and Listening contains
two one-act plays by Edward Albee. "Do you love me?"
a woman asks her husband, thus setting off a chain of questions,
fears and wild gestures in Counting the Ways, a brilliant
short play that explores the changing relationship between two people
long married but no longer sure of each other's love. The play was
presented in 1977 by the Hartford Stage Company on a double bill with
Listening – before it – as a nicely varied evening.
Counting the Ways is masterfully constructed, and glinting
with humour and insight. In a series of blackout sketches, "He"
and "She" probe into the nature of their love for one
another. Long married, but aware that time has wrought changes in
their relationship, the two spar and thrust at each other in
exchanges and reminiscences which are sometimes lighthearted,
sometimes poignant, sometimes almost brutal. In the end a mosaic of
experience is constructed, illuminating the nature of human love and
pointing up the gathering indifference that can beset those who have
been perhaps too long and too closely aligned in the sharing of
years. (First performed in 1976 at the National Theatre in London;
Cast: 1 female, 1 male)
What people say about Counting the
Ways:
"…sharply chiseled phrases
and stabs of poignancy." — New York Daily News
"…a very brilliant piece of
miniature painting." — Plays and Players
(London)
"…full of that particular
Albee prescription of fun and menace." — The New
York Times
Listening was written as a radio play, which could be
performed unaltered on stage, and was broadcast in 1976 on Earplay,
a nationally syndicated series on National Public Radio. Constructed
with the precision of a musical composition, and described by Clive
Barnes as "a chamber opera and a symbolic poem about
communication," the play juxtaposes three characters – "The
Man," "The Woman," and "The Girl" – and
sifts through the tangled relationship they have evidently shared.
The Man is amiable but distant; The Woman acerbic and bitter; The
Girl is perhaps mad – a catatonic who has destroyed her own child.
Elliptical in form and redolent with evocative overtones, the play
weaves together its strands of conversation and soliloquy into a
meaningful pattern of events – underscoring the inescapable fact
that while we may listen we do not always hear, and our lives, for
better or worse, are shaped accordingly. (First broadcast in 1976 on
BBC Radio Three in London; Cast: 2 female, 1 male)
About the Playwright:
Edward Albee (1928-2016) was an American playwright. Widely
considered the foremost American dramatist of his generation, he
wrote and directed some of the best plays in contemporary American
theatre. Three of his plays have received Pulitzer Prizes, and two
won a Tony Award for best play. He was awarded the Gold Medal in
Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in
1980, and in 1996 he received both the Kennedy Center Honors and the
National Medal of Arts. In 2005 he was awarded the special Tony Award
for Lifetime Achievement.
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