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“The best American playwright since Arthur Miller." A master of ‘ depraved obscenity.' An unflinching dissector of dysfunction. A willfully abstract audience-basher.” For about four decades, critics and theater-watchers have been calling Edward Albee names. ....

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.... looking a bit younger than 70, Albee would have changed his own sad past if he could. An orphan raised in chauffeured luxury, Edward was packed off to the first of three boarding schools at age 11. At Trinity, "I discovered that the required courses were not the ones I required." So he cut the classes that bored him and audited the ones that didn't. "It tells you something about the management of Trinity at the time that they didn't catch up with me until the middle of the sophomore year," he recalls. "That ended my formal education, and I suppose it didn't matter much. I'd figured out how to educate myself, and keep on doing it. To be fair to Tr ....