Summary:
"Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" is Edward Albee's attempt at articulating the crises of contemporary Western Civilization. It is written in the same mode as the works of the great dramatists of the 1930s who critiqued America as it moved from "confidence to doubt."
Edward Albee's (1928) play Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1961-62) exhibits concern with the crises of faith of contemporary western civilization. This thematic concern is rooted in two sources.
First it establishes a link with the dramatists of the thirties such as Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) and Arthur Miller (1915-2005). These dramatists had in their plays critiqued America as it moved from "confidence to doubt." In a land of success they wrote obsessively of the unsuccessful. Their characters such as Blanch Du Bois in Street Car Named Desire(1947), Joe Keller in All My Sons (1947), Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) and Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) all lead "posthumous lives." These are souls that have been lost as a consequence of the national myth of.....
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