Three-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and Montgomery Fellow Edward Albee drew frequent laughter and nods of approval from a packed Moore Theatre crowd during his lecture Tuesday afternoon.
"I was expected to participate in something called required courses. You may have heard of them," Albee said about his time at Trinity College in Hartford. "I simply looked at these required courses and discovered that they were not something that I required."
According to Albee, who never graduated from college, self-education is more important than earning a degree.
"I don't think you expect a playwright to have a degree, it might even be damaging," Albee said in a private interview with The Dartmouth on Monday. "The function of a formal education is to teach yourself how to continue your formal education once you're done with it," he added during Tuesday's lecture.
The focus of Albee's lecture was to draw attention to what he views as a suffocation of the arts by a consumer society. According to this thought, a large consumer focus has limited the availability of the arts to a threatening extent.
"Through a combination of economic control of the arts and our own passivity as a society, we are approaching a censorship which is more dangerous than any censorship imposed thoroughly from without," Albee said.
Albee drew upon many overlooked examples of this consumer focus in his speech yesterday. He noted large book stores' common practice of selling the most noticeable shelf space to big publishing companies while letting books from smaller companies, the "better" books according to Albee, hide in the corner.
Similarly, Albee feels television stations let sponsors determine the content of the shows. He was particularly passionate about the takeover of consumerism in theater, comparing the $45,000 cost of the first production of his play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," on Broadway in 1962 to the $1.5 million production a year and a half ago, noting that the increased costs of producing a play make producers less willing to take a chance on new writers. He feels this limits the availability of the arts and threatens the necessary education of society.
"The arts can tell us things," Albee said. "They can hold a mirror to us and say, 'Look, this is who we are. If you don't like what you see, why don't you change? Why don't you do something about it?'"
Albee's opinions regarding consumerism of the arts coincided with some student opinions at Dartmouth.
"It seems as though everything has become about Hollywood glam and contests for the best special effects. I miss the experience of theater: great acting, stimulating scripts and directors that mind the intent of the author," said Brittany Crosby '09, an aspiring playwright.
"It's so rare today and like Mr. Albee, I am afraid that it's slipping away."
According to Albee, the arts are vital to a person's necessary education.
"I'm convinced the people who are very well-informed in the arts will vote more intelligently," Albee said. "And that will probably get rid of a lot of Republicans."
The key to making the necessary changes to society through the arts is educating children at an early age, according to Albee.
In Monday's interview, he said that he hoped that Tuesday's audience would be made up mostly of students, instead of older attendants. because they have "minds that are not set yet in certain incorrect beliefs."
Albee emphasized why it is important to begin social education at a young age by offering an analogy about the difficulty of getting through to adults who are set in their ways.
"You can never educate a happy redneck, 36 years old, to be anything more than mildly civil to a black person," Albee said.
During his three days on-campus, Albee is scheduled to meet with theater and English students, including Crosby, to discuss the creative process.
"It was amazing to sit around and just 'pick the brain' of such a fantastic and inspiring playwright," Crosby said.
