Maggoty Urgings

Abstract This short chapter explains the debacle of Edward Albee’s short-lived, panned Broadway adaptation of Malcolm in January 1966. In 1964, Albee’s young boyfriend Terrence McNally wrote an adaptation of Malcolm that he was forced to shelve when Albee bought the option rights soon after McNally broke up with him. Albee commenced to write a weak adaptation to punish both McNally and Purdy, the latter for receiving “public praise of a fulsomeness—the extravagance of enthusiasm—that” provoked in him “envy and maggoty urgings toward revenge,” to use Albee’s language. Albee removed the black characters and almost all of the jazz, and changed Kermit from a “little person” to the world’s oldest man, neutering Malcolm. Ned Rorem wanted to write the music, but Albee’s ex-boyfriend William Flanagan instead offered his stilted compositions. More positively, after negotiation with Robert Giroux, Purdy hand-delivered the final draft of Eustace Chisholm and the Works.