Edward Albee is America’s greatest living playwright.
But even the greats can get hung up on a pesky third act.
This week, the Signature Theatre Company pulled his latest play, the cheekily titled “Laying an Egg,” from its 2012 lineup.
“Laying an Egg” was supposed to inaugurate the Signature’s posh new digs on West 42nd Street, designed by Frank Gehry.
“The Lady From Dubuque,” Albee’s strange and chilling 1980 play, will now christen the new Signature Center in January.
Signature issued a statement saying “Laying an Egg” wasn’t ready yet, adding that “all good things are worth the wait.”
The first two acts of the play are terrific. It’s the third act that’s giving the 83-year-old Albee some trouble.
“Laying an Egg” is about a middle-aged woman who’s trying to get pregnant despite several obstacles, including a domineering mother who makes the one in Albee’s masterpiece “Three Tall Women” look like Julie Andrews.
The woman in “Laying an Egg” is a kind, softer version of Martha from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” She’s fought her share of battles, to be sure, but now, more than anything else, she wants a child.
(“Virginia Woolf” fans will note that Martha wanted a child, but couldn’t conceive and invented an imaginary son.)
The first two acts of “Laying an Egg” are tender and moving and contain some of Albee’s most humane writing.
But Albee couldn’t crack (so to speak) the third act, in which an on-stage “egg” hatches.
“The first part of the play is realistic, but the third act veers off into absurdism,” a source says. “It’s an uneasy mix. Edward wrote it and rewrote it, but he finally said, ‘I just don’t have it yet.’ ”
I have no doubt he’ll get it. He usually does. He once told me that he never starts writing until the characters start talking to him. He takes them for a walk on the beach in Montauk, and by the time he gets back to his house, they’re yakking so much he starts writing it down.
“That,” he told me, “is when you know you have a play.”
Before Albee got hung up on the third act, he had some devilish fun torturing James Houghton, the Signature’s artistic director.
Here’s the exchange, as reported by someone who was there:
Albee: “Ask me the name of my new play.”
Houghton: “What is the name of your new play, Edward?”
Albee: “ ‘Laying an Egg.’ ”
Pause.
Albee: “Ask me what it’s about.”
Houghton: “What is your new play about, Edward?”
Albee: “Laying an egg.”
Albee loves these kind of exchanges. They remind him of zany old vaudeville routines he adored as a kid. His adoptive family owned the Keith-Albee Vaudeville Circuit, and he grew up around great comedians like Ed Wynn, Victor Moore and Jimmy Durante.
His favorite show of all time is “Hellzapoppin” — an insane revue by Olsen and Johnson that opened at the Winter Garden in 1938 and ran nearly 1,500 performances.
Albee still cracks up at the memory of the show’s best sight gag. There was a potted tree in the lobby, and at each intermission it got bigger until, by the end of the show, it reached the ceiling.
“I think he saw ‘Hellzapoppin’ when he was 10,” one of his friends once told me. “Seventy years later, he’s still laughing at that potted tree.”
“The Lady From Dubuque” doesn’t have a lot of sight gags. It’s one of Albee’s darkest plays — the subject matter is, after all, death. It drew mixed reviews in 1980. Clive Barnes called it “a comedy of manners about death.” But Walter Kerr called it “ornately convoluted.”
Mel Gussow, who wrote a splendid biography of Albee, reported that the playwright was drinking heavily when he wrote it.
“I remember not being sober enough to do the work,” Albee told Gussow.
Albee has retooled the play since then, and some critics now consider it one of his neglected works.
It’ll certainly do in a pinch, and I’m looking forward to David Esbjornson’s production.
But I’m still waiting for Albee to get that third act right.