‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Abstract

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? transformed Albee overnight from an off-Broadway experimenter into an American classic. The play was performed on Broadway: Albee’s producers and associates Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder showed unusual confidence in ensuring this, even though, equally unusually, they managed to mount the production for about half the cost of the standard straight play. It ran at the Billy Rose Theatre for two years, receiving two awards as the best play of the 1962–3 season, and earning the dramatist an instant reputation. A comparison with Eugene O’Neill imposed itself, both in terms of the perennial search for the successor to the pioneer of modern American drama, and also in recognition of the power and the very length of the play. The pundits were not slow to retitle it: Long Night’s Journey into Day — or daze, seeing the resemblance to O’Neill’s great autobiographical work; while others, more impressed by what they regarded as a sex battle in the play, likened Albee to Strindberg. The comparisons did not flatter the young playwright. His achievement in sustaining his quartet of players through an action of such length and intensity is remarkable.