Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? VATE REVISION LECTURE Presented by Christine Lambrianidis Senior English and Literature Teacher, Point Cook Senior BA (Hon.), Dip. Ed. “In your rebellion, the American theatre was born’’ (President Clinton, 1996)
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Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? VATE REVISION LECTURE Presented by Christine Lambrianidis Senior English and Literature Teacher, Point Cook.
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.’
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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.
“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
‘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
“[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