EDWARD ALBEE & A DIFFERENT TERROR

I once asked Edward Albee how was it that he could write such a deep play ("A Delicate Balance") at such a relatively shallow age (35)? I thought his a profound kind of insight gifted only those few we call artists. His simplistic answer surprised me. "Well, as a kid I used to listen in to my parents' parties...."

I thought to myself, well yeah so did I, but whence this staggering wisdom in referring to "the terror" taking up residence in the lives of his play? Unlike today's terrors by terrorists, Albee was alluding to that nameless, faceless terror that inevitably and inexorably seeps into our very being. As life gets shorter and death gets closer. How wise of him -- of any of us young or old -- to candidly confront "the terror." Rather than simply try to drink, drug or delay it away as if it doesn't apply to me!

Americans are by history a pragmatic people. We like to see what we're dealing with, give it a name, find a solution. Preferably quickly. Say, like, buying a hot quarterback or firing a cold coach or blowing up the bad guys with shock-and-awe. What we don't like -- what we don't really understand -- are problems that are vague and open-ended and demand persistence. And so the "terror" of a global jihad war makes us as angry and impatient as we are fearful and unsure.

Albee's "terror," though, is vastly different.

It doesn't come in bombs or in rage. Rather, it comes in silence and in the night. When you're younger you can catch a brief whiff in your darkest hours of defeat. At the job, in your relationships, in your goals. But when you're older -- like those glass-clinking friends of Albee's parents -- "the terror" often arrives un-announced. Most often when you're alone, when you're studying your mirror, when you're burying your parents and your friends. There comes this tick. Not the ticking of a bomb-strapped on a jihadist, but of your own clock next to your own bed.

Time happens. No one gets more than 60 minutes an hour. But at the same time, no one gets less. So life is the gift that keeps giving just so long as you know how to spend it. Albee's parents and their friends were apparently spending it well at these over-heard parties. And yet, it took a 35-year-old artist to hear -- and to dramatize -- what even they may not yet have heard. The terror of ticking time.

I don't know what happened to those friends once they did...but I do know that a young Edward Albee went on to capture and tame that terror. For everyone -- young and old. rich or poor -- to see and study as it moved across the theatre stage. Makes you think -- maybe there should be a prominent place for attending the theatre in any future health plan...!