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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee's Morality Play

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

C. W. E. Bigsby
C. W. E. Bigsby
Affiliation:
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
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Extract

Richard Schechner, the editor of the Tulane Drama Review, greeted Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a ‘persistent escape into morbid fantasy’. Like W. D. Maxwell, a member of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, he found it a filthy play and indicted it for its ‘morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience’. More perversely he saw in the play ‘an ineluctable urge to escape reality and its concomitant responsibilities by crawling back into the womb, or bathroom, or both’. His revulsion was shared by other critics who similarly misapprehended Albee's intention in a play which, far from endorsing illusion, remorselessly peels off protective fantasies in order to reach ‘the bone…the marrow’. Indeed, as Alan Schneider, the play's Broadway director, has asked, ‘is Albee not rather dedicated to smashing that rosy view, shocking us with the truth of our present-day behaviour and thought, striving to purge us into an actual confrontation with reality?’ (my italics).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , October 1967 , pp. 257 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

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