ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, instead of seeing Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as an example of the Theatre of the Absurd, the play is, at base, simply a love story: an examination of a long-wedded life, filled with the invariably accompanying hopes, dreams, disappointments, and pain that come with the passing of many years together. Its intimate and often hostile look into private married life was unsettling given the comfort of (supposed) normalcy that was a hallmark of the Leave It to Beaver United States of the 1950s and early 1960s. There is an argument to be made that such brutal honesty had never before been seen on the stage, and, thus, that the theatre was has never quite been the same since, as this play allowed (in a sense) other playwrights to air dirty laundry in the theatre—a theatre that, just before this play, portrayed a much cleaner environment. Albee, especially with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, almost single-handedly created the very genre of theatre where humor, joy, and tragedy could all coexist in a “household.” With Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, soon after, A Delicate Balance, Albee created the prototypical exemplars of tragicomic living room drama.
