He acknowledges that the figure of a lost

"Does he think it possible for the new generation of writers to achieve what Pinter and Rosetta Stone Language he managed to acplish through their plays? "It's more and more difficult for a playwright to make any noise," he says. "Serious, plex work isn't encouraged." Still, he thinks the best people will continue to emerge. "No one should be a playwright and expect to get as rich as a screenplay writer. But then the work is going to be an awful lot better because most screenplays are written by hacks. Or good people who are turned into hacks to finance the movies."Although he's dismayed by the empty-headed "mercialism" of the American theater, Albee doesn't want to see playwrights turning themselves into reformers or, worse, reporters. "I'm always suspicious of journalistic responses to specific issues." The piece that was probably most inspired by a public event, he says, was his 1960 drama "The Death of Bessie Smith," but his approach has generally been "to hold the mirror up to people and say, 'This is the way you're behaving. If you don't like what you see, change.' "This Chekhovian strategy fits his artistic temperament, but in everyday life he's all for playwrights responding to social injustice and political malfeasance. "One thing I didn't understand was why nobody protested that we had a coup d'tat with this latest Bush," he says. On a happier topic, he's impressed by President Obama and confesses that he has "nonintellectual feelings" about the maturity of the country to have elected a black man.What's interesting to note is that even when Albee's emotions are visibly engaged, he exhibits an astonishing capacity for cool putation. The shapeliness of his sentences seems to be immune to pique or pity. "I'd like to think that I can be more objective than a lot of people can," he says. "I think my objectivity began very early as an orphan. Being adopted, I didn't have the feeling that most kids have, that Language Learning Software these were the people who made me. That sense of familial obligation wasn't clouding up my responses to them."Albee had a famously turbulent relationship with his adoptive mother, whom he wrote about in his 1994 drama "Three Tall Women." When asked if he found the experience cathartic, he says he "doesn't know that he needed psychological help" but that he was pleased to hear from people who knew her that his depiction was in fact "nicer than she actually was."Resentment, in his view, can only get in the way of dramatic truth, which he's still actively pursuing with the same vigor of the young man who wrote "The Zoo Story," the play that nearly half a century ago introduced his distinctly voiced themes of alienation, sexual confusion and the self-deception implicit in social life. (Albee says he has two new dramas in the works, and a New York production of "Me, Myself I," which premiered last year at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., is still being discussed.)A zoo and a sandbox"The Zoo Story" remains as fresh as ever, but interestingly, it's "The Sandbox," another early play first done in 1960, that Albee says is the only one in which he "didn't make any mistakes." Puckishly, he adds, "But then it's hard to make mistakes in 12 minutes. If the play would have gone on another 40 seconds, I probably would have screwed up."He acknowledges that the figure of a lost or stolen baby crops up with noteworthy frequency in his work. But not in the mood for a Freudian frolic, and with Abigail receiving steady caresses from him, he'd prefer to talk about the prevalence of animals in his plays. "There's an extraordinary connection there," he says, itemizing the cats, dogs, lizards and even one hussy of a goat that have populated his stylized yet somehow pletely natural dramatic landscapes.Satisfied that he raised the subject, he diverts his attention to Rosetta Stone Arabic the four-legged creature leaping and pouncing with delightful abandon in this highbrow romper room of eclectic masterpieces.charles.mcnultylatimes.