Hermetic Albee: ‘Listening’

Abstract

In an interview in 1980 Albee spoke of ‘a shift between hermetic and straightforward pieces’.

I’ve been accused of becoming hermetic in my more recent work, and that my concern with language is getting a bit problematical for some people but that’s just tough. They ignore the fact that some of my plays are absolutely straightforward and the next one will be hermetic and difficult. My last play which was called Listening, was commissioned by the BBC and done on radio, and was a fairly hermetic piece.³⁶