This Week in Literary History: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Premieres in New York City

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THIS WEEK IN

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premieres in NYC.

On October 13, 1962, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened at the Billy Rose Theatre (now the Nederlander Theatre) on Broadway. It would go on to win the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, and in 1966, would be adapted into a now-iconic film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It was Albee’s first play to be staged on Broadway, and it is still his best known and arguably his most widely adored. 

When Howard Taubman reviewed the play for the Times in 1962, he found the final plot turn unbelievable but praised “Edward Albee’s furious skill as a writer,” and urged his readers to go see the play, whatever its faults. “For Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is possessed by raging demons. It is punctuated by comedy and its laughter is shot through with savage irony,” he wrote. “At its core is a bitter, keening lament over man’s incapacity to arrange his environment or private life so as to inhibit his self-destructive compulsions . . . On the surface the action seems to be mostly biting talk. Underneath is a witches’ revel.” 

Can’t argue with that. But what about that title? Albee explained its origin and meaning in a 1966 interview with William Flanagan for The Paris Review:

There was a saloon—it’s changed its name now—on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place, that was called something at one time, now called something else, and they had a big mirror on the downstairs bar in this saloon where people used to scrawl graffiti. At one point back in about 1953 … 1954, I think it was—long before any of us started doing much of anything—I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf … who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical university, intellectual joke.

Despite the fact that the play was unusually long (almost three hours), it was immensely popular, and its original Broadway run stretched over a year and a half, through May 16, 1964. In large part owing to the success of this play (and its film adaptation, which cemented it as his most famous work), Albee would go on to be, as the Times asserted in 2016, “widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life.” In his long career, he racked up three Pulitzer Prizes and two Tonys, among other awards and nominations, and his plays continue to be among the most studied and revived today. 

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Writing Advice from Edward Albee

Edward Albee, Big in Bulgaria

Good Luck, Writers

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”

In other (old)

news this week

The New York Times publishes its first book review section, which will eventually become The New York Times Book Review (October 10, 1896) • Original Literary Mean Girl Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is published (October 10, 1957) • The frequently anthologized Alfred Lord Tennyson is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey (October 12, 1892) • Sylvia Plath writes “Daddy,” Courtney Love’s future favorite poem (October 12, 1962) • Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is published, despite its author’s hatred of writing (October 12, 1979) • Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (sigh) (October 13, 2016) • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is published, including at least a few of his best stories (October 14, 1892) • Edith Wharton’s still-relevant masterpiece The House of Mirth is published (October 14, 1905) • T. S. Eliot founds The Criterion magazine, which contains the first publication of his very good poem The Waste Land (October 15, 1922) • Charlotte Brontë’s secret genre novel Jane Eyre is published (October 16, 1847) • RoboCop enthusiast Hilary Mantel wins the Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies, becoming the first Briton and first woman to win twice (October 16, 2012).

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“It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel or La Gioconda, Madame Bovary or War and Peace. The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not.”

–ANN PETRY

Born this week in 1908

“Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one’s mother’s womb.”

–ITALO CALVINO

Born this week in 1923

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