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

Michael Y. Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138097421
• eBook ISBN: 9781351599528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shocked audiences and critics alike with its assault on decorum. At base though, the play is simply a love story: an examination of a long-wedded life, filled with the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and pain that accompany the passing of many years together.

While the ethos of the play is tragicomic, it is the anachronistic, melodramatic secret object—the nonexistent "son"—that upends the audience's sense of theatrical normalcy. The mean and vulgar bile spewed among the characters hides these elements, making it feel like something entirely "new."

As Michael Y. Bennett reveals, the play is the same emperor, just wearing new clothes. In short, it is straight out of the grand tradition of living room drama: Ibsen, Chekhov, Glaspell, Hellmann, O'Neill, Wilder, Miller, Williams, and Albee.

1

The play’s contexts

I.

When Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? first hit the stage in 1962, the page in 1963, and then the screen shortly thereafter in 1966, the play had a shock factor. Even today, even after seeing and reading it over and over again, it is still a shocking play. However, I am not quite so sure that the “shock” was the same type of shock for the initial viewers and readers as it is for me and my contemporaries. In the early-to-mid 1960s, theatre audiences and readers (and, importantly too, audiences of cinematic adaptations of plays) had spent the previous decade watching and reading the “Great” plays of the 1950s by the dons of American theatre’s Golden Age, if you will: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Think what 1950s theatre (and film) brought: the film version of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1951); the film version of Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); Miller’s The Crucible (1953); Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955); Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955); the release of O’Neill’s 1939–41 Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956); the film version of Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958); and the list could go on.

Used to these classic 1950s American living room dramas, theatre audiences and readers in the 1960s faced a shock which was largely due to how Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was seen as a vile display of everything that is dark and abhorrent about humans. That shock was twofold. First, it came from seeing an unflattering representation of ourselves as humans. This was the sense of pain or displeasure upon learning or hearing that you are less than you thought you were (i.e., upending one’s worldview). And, second, the shock came from the surprise at seeing what was the first (very successful) play to air such dirty laundry. This was the same surprise as one feels when encountering something radically new or unexpected. Dena Marks succinctly summarizes the initial responses to Albee’s play, noting that “reviewers noticed Albee’s dark, negative aesthetic”: “[Harold] Clurman wrote that the play is ‘morbid,’ ‘venomous,’ and ‘pessimistic’ … John Simon [said] that Albee’s work ignores the good that exists in the world … On account of his bleakness, Taubman link[ed] Albee to Beckett and Pinter, and for the same reason, separates him from realists such as Ibsen, Shaw, and O’Neill.”¹ It is Taubman’s mention of O’Neill that begs investigation and the answer will, ultimately, guide this book.

In his biography of Albee, Mel Gussow notes that Albee, who admits to this, owes O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh a debt of thematic gratitude. O’Neill’s play discusses the loss of pipe dreams, whereas Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? discusses the illusionary nature of those (same) pipe dreams.² However, Gussow, ultimately, thinks that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is “a direct challenge to O’Neill.”³ Anne Paolucci goes a touch further in relating Albee to O’Neill: “[Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] is, in Albee’s repertory, what Long Day’s Journey into Night is in O’Neill’s; the aberrations, the horrors, the mysteries are woven into the fabric of a perfectly normal setting so as to create the illusion of total realism, against which the abnormal and the shocking have even greater impact.”⁴

Ever since I saw the Guthrie Theater’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in February 2013 in Minneapolis, I have come to see, and continually reaffirm to myself, the remarkable affinity between O’Neill’s play and Albee’s. The Guthrie Theater’s production focused on the Tyrone family’s addictions, but somehow this tragic living room drama was, totally unexpectedly to me going into the play, very funny: “The focus on addiction did not, by itself, make the play funny, but de-emphasizing the other diseases (e.g., Edmund’s consumption, which also connotes his self-destructive verve for life, and Mary’s rheumatism, which also connotes her pathological self-consciousness) allowed for some comedic choices to be made, rather than highlighting their diseased, tormented souls.”⁵ With the focus on only one issue, the world and the Tyrone family did not feel quite so doomed to be engulfed by the overwhelming forces coming from every direction that seem to swallow them whole.

The moments of levity in this production, then, were not moments that simply allowed one to take a breath from the suffocation of the omnipresent disease in the Tyrone household, but allowed for laughter: “The simultaneously comedic and tragic family drama became a staple of the theatre during the second half of the twentieth century. Just as the family-room tragicomedies, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, would not exist without Long Day’s Journey, so the Guthrie Theater’s production of O’Neill’s masterpiece would not exist without the tragicomic sensibility of those plays.”⁶ Usually, the “new” both makes the “old” old and allows us to re-view the old in a fresh light. It was, however, a “new” way to see the “old” that made me see the “new” as “old.” What I am trying to say is simple: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is straight out of the grand tradition of the living room drama: Ibsen, Chekhov, Glaspell, Hellmann, O’Neill, Wilder, Miller, Williams, and Albee.

II.

Theatrical contexts

How do we get to this lineage and not, given Albee’s association with the absurd, just make the leap (or step) from the quintessential “absurdist,” Samuel Beckett, to Edward Albee? In his seminal book, The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau discusses the fiction of “history,” as he asserts that through the selection of beginning and end points, history is drawn by historians in the present.⁷ So if we want to play this game as well, there are two “histories” that work well in defining the historical context of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the same way that history is somewhat fictionally drawn in the present by selecting specific beginning and end points, we can extend two theatrical contexts through lines that converge at Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: one is the line drawn from O’Neill to Albee regarding the development of the American living room drama and tragic realism, and the other is the line drawn from Beckett to Albee regarding the development of the European theatrical avant-garde.

From O’Neill to Albee: American living room drama and tragic realism

The first line of theatrical context is that of the emergence of American twentieth-century drama. On the one hand, this emergence is directly influenced by European theatrical realism, naturalism, and expressionism. On the other hand, it is a distinctly American invention. Clearly influenced by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and August Strindberg, but also trying to find itself and its own voice, American twentieth-century drama is widely purported to have emerged from the plays and playwrights associated with the Provincetown Players. However, we can also overlay Eugene O’Neill’s theatrical career onto the major historical (and theatrical) periods in US (and world) history: the Great War (now known as World War I); the interwar years; and World War II and the post-WWII period. The trajectory of O’Neill’s career is worth exploring here because his development of tragic living room drama leads us to Albee’s own tragicomic living room dramas.

O’Neill’s first plays, one-acts, date from 1913, the year before WWI. These include his earliest naturalistic plays, Web, A Web for Life, Recklessness, and Thirst (all 1913); his slightly later one-act “Sea Plays” (also known as his “Glencairn Plays”)—Bound East for Cardiff (1914), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and Moon of the Caribbees (1918)—and his full-length play, Beyond the Horizons (1918), which garnered him his first Pulitzer Prize in 1920. This is the period when he was a part of the Provincetown Players, most notable for producing Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) besides the works of O’Neill. O’Neill and Glaspell both experimented with local dialects, moved theatre into and then out of theatrical naturalism into theatrical realism, and continued to examine the everyman/everywoman in looking at characters from the lower classes as well. Here, we still see a lot of European influence, particularly from August Strindberg and European naturalism.

Continuing into the interwar years (i.e., 1919–1939), O’Neill’s notable full-length plays from that period were Anna Christie (1920), for which he received his second Pulitzer, The Emperor Jones (1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interludes (1928), for which he received his third Pulitzer, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Ah, Wilderness! (1933). To O’Neill’s contributions, we can add Lillian Hellmann’s The Children’s Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939) and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) and Skin of our Teeth (1942). This is the period of full-fledged theatrical realism, though The Emperor Jones is of course a prime example of American expressionism. These plays are (generally) psychological portraits of a family or individuals. By the interwar years, American theatre was no longer necessarily influenced by Europe, but was itself influencing Europe and taking the lead.

O’Neill’s last plays were written between 1939 and 1943, at the beginning and middle of WWII, though these later plays were performed following WWII, starting with the performances of The Iceman Cometh (1946) and A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The play’s contexts
• 2 The play in retrospect: Seeing the “new” as “old”
• 3 The play and players
• 4 The play’s legacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index