Viennese Not Waltzing Over Albee’s ‘Three Tall Women’ : Stage: The disaffected American playwright is premiering his latest work far from home because Broadway ‘is our national disgrace.’

Puzzled whispers echo through the audience at Vienna’s English Theatre, where Edward Albee’s latest play, “Three Tall Women,” is having its world premiere. “Surcease,” the dying protagonist proclaims just before the curtain falls. “That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we can stop.”

“Surcease?” the Viennese wonder aloud, stumbling more over the unfamiliar vocabulary than Albee’s notion that death might come as a welcome respite.

“Why hasn’t anybody ever heard of the word surcease ? Isn’t that strange?” asks the American playwright, conceding that a pitfall of staging his work abroad is the foreign audience. “The laughs do come late, since my language is a little ornate and convoluted sometimes.”

But Albee, 63, complains that his fate has been to be misunderstood on Broadway as well as on the European stage, where his earliest plays were first presented. Unable to get his one-act “The Zoo Story” produced in New York, Albee made his theatrical debut in Berlin in 1959. More than 30 years later he is producing his most recent work, “Three Tall Women,” a rumination on demise and disillusionment, at a relatively obscure playhouse far from home.

Although he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1967 for “A Delicate Balance” and the other in 1975 for “Seascape,” he has long divided critics. Some found 1962’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” masterful, others thought it depraved.

The bitterness Albee expressed in his first productions seems to have been fueled by the rough treatment he now routinely receives from critics contending he has failed to fulfill his promise as savior of the American stage.

He offers up a familiar diatribe against the U.S. commercial theater scene: “Too many people still assume Broadway is our national theater, when it is our national disgrace. I came in at the tag end of those few years when more serious plays were happily accepted on Broadway, before people got the weird idea that because they were paying for the ticket they had the right to determine the content.”

And so Albee tries out his plays in Vienna. “I’ve worked here so often it has almost become a habit,” he says. Albee has staged his own plays in their original English versions as well as works by Sam Shepard and David Mamet.

Albee sees himself as a survivor and denies that the brooding closing lines of “Three Tall Women” represent his current train of thought: “You’ve got to keep battering your head against the wall. I don’t want to die before I’m ready to, and I have no intention of being ready ever. But when the time comes, I hope that I will be able to face it with a certain calm and sense that I’ve participated in it.”