ABSTRACT
Were it not for Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it would be hard to imagine the existence of Ayad Akhtar’s recent Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced. Nor would we be able to fathom the existence of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County; nor Tony Kushner’s Angels in America; nor Marsha Norman’s ’night Mother. In fact, it is hard to gauge the full impact of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in part because, since it is Albee’s best-known work, the play has had such an impact that it has become somewhat a shorthand for Albee’s whole career. If, then, we ask the question of whom in American theatre did Edward Albee and his entire oeuvre influence, the answer would read like a who’s who of American theatre over six-plus decades. This chapter wraps up this book with a collage of thoughts about the “impact” of this play from members of the advisory board of the academic book series New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies, of which I am the series editor: Linda Ben-Zvi, Natka Bianchini, John M. Clum, David A. Crespy, Lincoln Konkle, and Matthew Roudané.
