Albee’s last wish: Destroy unfinished work
Edward Albee died last fall. But the renowned playwright is making one last request from the great beyond.
Albee wants two of his friends to destroy any incomplete manuscripts he left behind.
The instruction — included in a will Albee filed on Long Island, where he lived and died — is unusual but not unprecedented. There is a term in the legal world for such instructions — dead hand control — and, although compliance has varied and enforceability is debatable, they have been attempted by artists from Franz Kafka to a Beastie Boy.
For now, the impact of Albee’s will is a mystery. The executors — an accountant, Arnold Toren, and a designer, William Katz, both longtime friends of the playwright — declined through a spokesman to answer questions. But the executors have been carrying out other aspects of Albee’s will.
This fall, at the request of the estate, Sotheby’s will auction off more than 100 artworks collected by Albee; the proceeds, estimated at more than $9 million, will benefit his namesake foundation. (The playwright, who was gay, never married and had no children or close relatives. His foundation, which maintains a residence for artists in Montauk, N.Y., is the primary beneficiary of his estate.)
The executors have made clear they plan to honor Albee’s desires, even when they might be controversial. In May, for example, they refused to allow a tiny Oregon theater to cast a black actor as a blond character in a production of Albee’s most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, citing the playwright’s intentions as expressed during his lifetime.
Now at stake, at a minimum, are the latest drafts of Albee’s final known project, Laying an Egg, about a middle-aged woman struggling to become pregnant. (Paradoxically, one plot element concerned her father’s will.) The play was twice scheduled for production at Signature Theater, an off-Broadway nonprofit in New York, and twice withdrawn by Albee, who said it wasn’t ready.
Albee is best known for Virginia Woolf. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times — in 1967 for A Delicate Balance, in 1975 for Seascape and in 1994 for Three Tall Women — and the Tony Award twice, in 1963 for Virginia Woolf and in 2002 for The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? He also won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2005.
The playwright died in September at the age of 88. His will, which he signed in 2012, was filed in Suffolk County Surrogate’s Court; the provision in question says, in part: “If at the time of my death I shall leave any incomplete manuscripts I hereby direct my executors to destroy such manuscripts.”
Until the manuscripts are destroyed, the will says, the executors should “treat the materials herein directed to be destroyed as strictly confidential.”
Lawyers who study the intersection of estate law and intellectual property say the issue is actually murkier.
Eva E. Subotnik, an associate professor at St. John’s University School of Law, argued for some skepticism about such provisions.
“There is something special about these kinds of assets — they’re not just like a mansion or a fancy watch, but they’re socially valuable, and that has to play into the calculus,” Subotnik said.
But another expert on the subject, Lior J. Strahilevitz, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, disagreed.
“Part of what we value in a great artist is not just raw ability but the ability to curate, and it’s frequently the case that artists build great reputations by being selective about what they show to the world,” he said. “It’s problematic to force Albee to share these plays when he didn’t think they were good enough.”