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

VATE REVISION LECTURE Presented by Christine Lambrianidis

Senior English and Literature Teacher, Point Cook SeniorBA (Hon.), Dip. Ed.

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Performancelambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au

“In your rebellion, the American theatre was born’’ (President Clinton, 1996)

Structure of Lecture

1. Views and Values

2. Outline of Play

3. Features

4. Interpretations

5. Passage Analysis

Views & Values of 1960s America

‘Edward Albee burst onto the American theatrical scene in the late 1950s with a variety of plays that detailed the agonies and disillusionment of that decade and the transition from the placid Eisenhower years to the turbulent 1960s.’ http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3687&source_type=A

Views & Values of Edward Albee

‘I am basically concerned with the health of my own society […] I have always thought of the

United States as a revolutionary society and our revolution is

supposed to be a continuing one, one of

the very few slow revolutions that is not

bogged down in bureaucracy and

totalitarianism.’ (In an interview with Christopher Bigsby,

quoted in Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century

American Drama, Volume Two: Williams/Miller/Albee, p.329.)

Views & Values of Edward Albee

‘Albee himself describes…[his work as] "an examination of

the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and

vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this

slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.”’

http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3687&source_type=A

Views & Values of Edward Albee

“[T]he health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have

insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that

they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts--save the dance (in which

nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?”

(Edward Albee, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One?’, New York Times,

February 25, 1962.)

Outline of the Play

‘…Albee’s first commercial success and deals, in part, with the theme of how people need illusions to survive. A warring married

couple, George and Martha…sustain between them the illusion that they have a child, but, in fact, they are childless. This is

in itself a symbol, perhaps, of the sterility of their lives together. They play sadistic

games of mutual humiliation and make targets also of the two younger guests [Nick and Honey] they have invited to their home. Although the play is a comedy, it is intended

as a dark comedy, a statement about marriage, moral confusion and cruelty in

contemporary America.’ (Don Shiach, American Drama 1900-1990, p.44)

Albee on the Play

“Every one of my plays is an act of optimism, because I

make the assumption that it is possible to communicate with other people. The people who

think Virginia Woolf was a love story are a lot closer to

the truth than those who think it was a tragedy. At least there was communication in

that marriage." http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3687&source_type=A

Features of the Play ‘Fusing domestic realism with the cyclical verbal

interplay and mysterious uncertainties characteristic of the so-called “theatre of the

absurd”…’ (Stephen Bottoms, Cambridge Companion to Albee, p.4)

Interpretations• Existentialism - Truth

and Illusion

• A Play about Plays and the Theatre – Storytelling and Game Playing

• From Naturalism to Absurdism, Modernism to Post Modernism, Structuralism to Post-Structuralism

Interpretations

• Language, Discourse and Power – Conflict and Control

• Anthropology, Science, History and Psychology – Animalistic Nature and Civilisation

• Feminism, Sexual Revolution and Gender Stereotypes

Passage Analysis

Passage 1: Bergin Monologue (p.50-51, 48.18 in film)

Passage 2: Get the Guests (p.75-6, 1.13.20 in film)

Passage 3: Bringing Up Baby (p.123-4, 1.53.20 in film)

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