Study Guide to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Other Works by Edward Albee

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Aides à l'étude
• Subtopic: Guides d'étude

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Edward Albee, well renowned American dramatist and theatrical producer. Titles in this study guide include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, and Tiny Alice.

As a major playwright of the twentieth century, Albee's work established him as a sharp critic of American values. Moreover, he expertly displayed slashing insight and witty dialogue in the gruesome portrayal of marriage, family life, and self revelation. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Albee's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO EDWARD ALBEE

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Edward Albee was born in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 1928. At the age of two weeks he was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee and taken to live in the family home in Westchester, New York. Albee’s new father had inherited a nationwide chain of vaudeville theaters, the Keith-Albee Circuit, which had been founded by Edward Franklin Albee II. Though the enterprise was eventually sold, the family’s show business acquaintances meant that young Albee was often exposed to theater personalities. Reed Albee died on August 2, 1961 and his obituary listed one other adopted child besides Edward, but to our knowledge Albee has never mentioned him in any interview.

Albee’s childhood, to say the least, was extremely comfortable. A magazine reports that this was a time “of servants, tutors, riding lessons; winters in Miami, summers sailing on the Sound; there was a Rolls to bring him, smuggled in lap robes, to matinees in the city; an inexhaustible wardrobe housed in a closet big as a room…” (“Who Isn’t Afraid of Edward Albee?” Show, February 1963, p. 83). Albee has never made any explicit comments about the happiness of his childhood. His father was believed, however, to be dominated by his wife, who was considerably younger than her husband and an avid athlete. Albee was apparently very close to his maternal grandmother to whom he dedicated his short play, The Sandbox.

Albee’s educational background is extremely erratic and marked by poor performance. Because his family spent many of their winters in Florida, Albee was often transferred from school to school and thus was unable to make many strong friendship ties. In a period of five years he was dismissed from three schools. He attended Rye Country Day School until he was eleven and then Lawrenceville, a preparatory school in New Jersey, beginning in 1940. He did poorly in his academic studies, and was asked to leave in 1943. Albee then spent a year at the Valley Forge Military Academy because his mother felt his poor performance would be remedied by strict discipline; the experiment was unsuccessful, and he left there and entered the Choate School at Wallingford, Connecticut in 1944.

The two years at Choate were happy and productive ones for Albee. He began to read widely. During this period he published nine poems, eleven short stories, an essay on Johann Strauss, Jr., and a one-act play called Schism in the Choate Literary Magazine. While these pieces are imitative and trite, they nevertheless demonstrate an impressive facility with language and a sound sense of dialogue. On graduating from Choate in 1946, Albee enrolled at Trinity College, a small liberal arts institution in Hartford, Connecticut. Although his stay there was brief, he gained some dramatic experience playing the role of Emperor Franz Joseph in Maxwell Anderson’s The Masque of Kings. This stay at Trinity was the final episode in his formal education, except for brief enrollments at Washington University and Columbia.

Albee left his parents’ home in 1950, expressing a strong desire to become a writer. With the assistance of a fifty-dollar per week income from a trust-fund established by his grandmother in 1949 and a variety of part-time jobs, he was able to set up an apartment in Greenwich Village. His part-time jobs in this period from his twenty-first to his thirtieth birthday included working as an office-boy in an advertising agency, writing music programs for a radio station, selling records at Bloomingdale’s and books at Gimbel’s, and running messages for Western Union.

During this long period he worked at his writing continuously, yet the results of these efforts are largely unknown. With the exception of a single poem published in a Texas literary journal, the poetry he wrote and a long novel have never been made available for study. We do know, however, that his roommate during part of this time was a young composer, William Flanagan, who later wrote the music for The Sandbox and Malcolm, and a musical adaptation, Billy Budd. Flanagan has given us some knowledge of the writers who influenced Albee during this period of development - Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett, for example, were among Albee’s literary heroes. Albee also met W. H. Auden, who suggested that he develop his art by writing pornographic verse; and in 1953 he met Thornton Wilder at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, who suggested that he concentrate on drama.

It was a rather dramatic event when, nearly on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Albee sat down and wrote his first major play, The Zoo Story, which was first produced in 1959. From this point on Albee began to establish himself as a major figure in the American theater. After helping to establish a genuine avant-garde movement, he entered the ranks of Broadway playwrights in 1962 with his most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

For over a decade Albee has regularly introduced plays on the American stage - to this date he has written thirteen plays. He is a noteworthy figure in the American theater not only for his works, but also for his efforts to introduce new talent and techniques. In 1962 Albee and two young producers, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, founded the Cherry Lane Theater, which in its first year produced nine plays, all in the Absurdist tradition. Among them were his own plays, The Zoo Story and The American Dream; also, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch, Eugene Ionesco’s The Killer, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Two years later, the three men founded “Theater 1964” which funded such plays as Beckett’s Play and Pinter’s The Lover. Since then Albee has helped to found the Playwright’s Unit which has received substantial grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council of the Arts. This organization produced over a hundred plays, but at the present time, the Unit is dormant and Albee is engaged in still another project to sponsor creative literary efforts - the William Flanagan Center for Creative Persons, which is funded solely by Albee with the world-wide profits derived from The American Dream and The Zoo Story. Called “The Stable” by its inhabitants, it is located on a property Albee purchased in 1969 at Montauk, Long Island.

In addition to his writing and his efforts in sponsoring new plays, Albee has participated in a wide variety of symposiums on drama and the arts and has lectured to college audiences throughout the country. In 1963 he spent a month in the Soviet Union on a tour sponsored by the American State Department. The awards Albee has received for his work have been quite impressive, especially the Pulitzer Prize, which he received in 1967 for A Delicate Balance.

At the present time Albee is working on several plays, including a longstanding project called “The Substitute Speaker”. Another play, Seascape, is supposed to be produced on Broadway soon: Albee has said that it is a companion piece of All Over and that the two will carry the joint title Life and Death.

ALBEE’S PHILOSOPHY AND ARTISTRY

In an interview in 1946 Eugene O’Neill commented on something his father had said: “’The theater is dying.’ And those words seem to me as true today as when he said them. But the theater must be a hardy wench, for although she is still ailing, she will never die as long as she offers an escape.” O’Neill’s statement seems particularly relevant to this discussion of Albee’s philosophical and artistic beliefs and to the analysis of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which follows in the next chapter. First of all, the statement reveals that O’Neill felt much the same way about the state of the theater in his day as Albee feels about the theater today - that it is ailing though its function in society is still an important one. Second, it capsulizes the dichotomy between the two playwrights’ convictions about what the theater should offer to the public. Third, it serves as a cogent reminder that despite the contributions which both O’Neill and Albee and many other playwrights have made, the theater still ails and will no doubt always be lacking in perfection.

The following discussion is meant to provide an awareness of the major philosophical and artistic premises of Edward Albee’s work which either suggest themselves when we study the plays or which have been offered by Albee himself in the public media. Equipped with these insights we can attempt a detailed analysis of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Is Albee a member of the Theater of the Absurd? What is the nature of his relationship with that movement? What are the major premises of his drama? What are the major themes and artistic qualities of his plays? Can one identify a continuity of theme and artistry running throughout the works? Why is Albee so very angry? What is the nature of his social commitment?

ALBEE AND THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD

One of the major contributions Albee has made is his important work in the introduction of the European Theater of the Absurd to the American theater. The beginning of his career in 1960 came at a time when the American theater was generally in decline; only on the college campuses was there a strong interest in new and innovative drama. Virtually unaware of the European avant-garde movement, professional theater had become reliant on the largely uncontroversial works of a handful of famous playwrights who had ceased to break ground years before and who had now discovered the pulse of popular idiom. It was primarily a naturalistic theater which combined a few shocking scenes, snatches of suspense, and an affirmation of existing values. The Theater Establishment situated on Broadway had in almost every respect oriented its values toward judging the worth of a play on the basis of box office returns. It was economically unfeasible, given such a clime, for a true American avant-garde movement to flourish - two such organizations, The Artist’s Theater and The Living Theater, attempted to sustain such an outlet for new work, but both were forced to close because they lacked sufficient public support. Without such non-commercially oriented institutions operating in the dramatic community, large-scale experimentation is impossible.

In an article which Albee wrote for The New York Times (February 25, 1962), “Which Theater is the Absurd One?,” he noted that in major European cities there were more numerous productions of the works of Absurdist playwrights - Adamov, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, etc. - and the audiences seemed far more receptive and willing to support this exciting postwar movement. Even in Buenos Aires, he had discovered, there were over a hundred experimental theaters.

Albee’s arrival on the American theater scene with The Zoo Story in 1960 and The American Dream in 1961 thus came at a time when conditions were ripe and, indeed, when there was a clear need for a new theater which did not offer merely an affirmation of public values and accommodation to financial backers. Thus along with Jack Gelber (The Connection, 1959), Kenneth Brown (The Brig, 1963), Arthur Kopit (Oh Dad, Poor Dad, 1960) and several other young playwrights, Albee introduced a drama which was directly inspired by the themes and techniques of the Theater of the Absurd, but which was adapted to an American idiom.

IS ALBEE AN ABSURDIST?

The artistic and philosophical relationship between Albee’s drama and the Theater of the Absurd has been commonly misunderstood even though plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All Over have come a long way from The American Dream. The original endorsement Albee gave of the Theater of the Absurd was based both on its refreshing technical innovations and on what he defined as its basic purpose: “to make a man face up to the human condition as it really is…” Albee has taken this as the basis for his drama - in every play and through every technical experiment he has remained essentially faithful to that premise. But in what significant ways does Albee differ from the Absurdists? In exploring this question, it would be helpful to briefly describe the major characteristics of the Theater of the Absurd and then to suggest the major points of departure.

The voices of Albee, Gelber, Pinter, and the entire Theater of the Absurd have been collectively called an “existential revolt” or, in the words of Camus, “a metaphysical rebellion” against the state of man in the universe. The impetus which gave rise to this re-examination of man’s metaphysical state and subsequent revolt was the spectre of what T. S. Eliot called “The Waste Land” which is by now familiar to most students. It is a world of “broken images,” of the destruction and sterility of war, of the alienation of man in a world which has become unintelligibly complex, of the impossibly difficult task of maintaining one’s individuality and consciousness, and of the haunting possibility that God is dead. For people living in this “Waste Land,” life is nothing but “Birth and copulation and death” and the bleak awareness of their own nonessentiality - thus of the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence. The pervasive feeling of Absurdity was defined by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus as arising in the modern world when traditional illusions and firm, popularly relied upon truths of former times become almost comically irrelevant to a civilization decimated by war and alienated by a huge industrial machine. Consequently, man became dissociated from his place in the universe and became an exile who was separated from his own life - this awareness constitutes the feeling the Absurdity. The emergence of the Theater of the Absurd after the war became the literary expression of this new awareness of man’s position in the universe, while Existentialism was adopted as its philosophical expression. These artists sought to demonstrate this awareness of man’s alienation, his spiritual decay and sterility, his inertia and his horror at the spectre of death - in sum, “to make a man face up to the human condition as it really is…” This avant-garde movement thus seeks to expose the most terrible and despairing truths of man’s existence; its techniques are typically wild and macabre, making full use of incongruity and ambiguity - familiar dramatic conventions could not express its subject matter. The world of the Absurd, in effect, is “flying apart” and man is actually decaying and being overcome with the overpowering nothingness of existence.

What, then, are the scenes of modern man and his world in the Theater of the Absurd? Since “nothing connects with nothing” in “The Waste Land,” there is no reason why mushrooms cannot sprout in the dining room or that the entire stage should not collapse in Ionesco’s Amedee and The Future is in Eggs. The mysterious knock at the door is the haunting presence of Pereira, the symbol of Death and subsequent Nothingness of the afterlife, in Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes; and the equally as mysterious arrival of Goldberg and McCann in Pinter’s The Birthday Party takes Stanley into imminent darkness. The same spectre appears again in Ionesco’s The Chairs in which the emptiness of the chairs drives the old couple to jump from the tower rather than to wait for death. There is also total inertia, the inability to act for oneself - Gogo and Didi in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot announce their intention to leave, but remain motionless; and in his Endgame Nell and Meg, having no arms or legs, live in ash cans. All of these scenes are ones of desolation and despair in which decay is irreversible.

DEPARTURE FROM THE ABSURD

Albee’s departure from this vision of man in the modern world is a significant one. The crucial difference between what we have seen in this philosophy of the abnegation of human existence and the position Albee takes is that he still retains a fundamental faith in man. While the true participants in the “metaphysical rebellion” see man existing in a s...