Playwright Edward Albee, the author of 26 plays including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, talked about his formative years as a dramatist at the Hasty Pudding Theater yesterday.

Albee, this year's Kayden visiting artist, perched yesterday on the edge of the cluttered set for a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as he spoke with about 90 undergraduates.

Although Albee began to write when he was eight, it took some time for him to discover his vocation for the stage.

Albee is now a professor at the University of Houston, where he also writes and directs. Although his official education ended when he left college, he learned his technique by reading and watching others.

"I learned to educate myself in a kind of schizophrenic fashion," he said.

Albee said he left college in his sophomore year. His initial attempts at a writing career failed, and he was delivering telegrams in Greenwich Village and pushing 30 when inspiration struck.

Until that moment, he had written nothing for the stage, he said, "with the exception of a three-act sex farce I wrote when I was 12... when my knowledge of farce and of sex were less developed than they are now."

As "a sort of 30th birthday present to myself," he decided to write what would become "Zoo Story," his first play.

"My motives for writing are very, very simple," he said. "I discover I've got an idea or something. It plans to be a play, and I have to get it out of my head. I write because I'm a writer. I write plays because I'm a play-wright. It's my nature."

Albee's unorthodox process has actually helped him when he directs his and others' plays, he said.

"One thing I do have, much more than many directors have, is a desire to honor the playwright's intentions and the playwright's words," he said.

Albee said that while Chekov, Beckett and Pirandello influenced him, his artistic vision remains his own. "The whole matter of influence is learning from other writers how to be yourself," he said.

Albee likened the process of artistic creation to black magic. Both, he said, derive their power from the veil of secrecy that surrounds them.

"I take from all sources," he said. "I draw from people I know, from characters I make up, from people I see. We should never be limited to things that have happened. We should be able to explore alternatives and ambiguities."

Although Albee has written for film on a few occasions, he said the genre limits his role as a creator.

"I want to reach huge audiences, or as huge audiences as I can, with what I have to say intact," he said.

Although he lamented the dearth of American interest in "serious theater," Albee himself has recently risen to new prominence, with eight of his productions scheduled for performance this year at the Signature Theater Company of New York.

"Next year, when I don't have eight plays on Broadway, boy am I going to be grumpy," he mused.