Topher Gregory

Research Report: The Genre, or Who is Edward Albee?

             Edward Albee is a playwright I knew very little about going into the Alley Theater one winter night a few years ago.  After finishing seeing what I must say was a magnificent production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I was immediately turned on to the uniqueness of the play (as uniqueness is a trait I am oft-drawn to) and the creator of the recently written masterpiece.  Throughout my paper, I will be going behind Edward Albee’s particular biographical experiences feeding into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  as well as describing which genre constructs made this play into a well–functioning (albeit one of its kind) production.

            I will begin my discussion on how Albee’s life influenced his playwriting by explaining my knowledge of Albee’s person.  After being exposed to the genius of Virginia Woolf late during high school through the production I attended, Howard Bloom and other critics at the library, and performing The Zoo Story during my senior year I gathered a mental portrait of this playwright.  However, I thus far have not imagined him outside of the realm of the theater, so I attributed him with the characters and more importantly the themes of the plays he wrote.  As a result, I once thought of him to be an angry playwright, mad at the directions the fragile American culture headed during earlier years, using his plays as creative outlets.  This is not altogether an incorrect assumption.  As Matthew Roudané elaborates in The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, “While most see the play as a heated domestic drama, Virginia Woolf is not without its political textures. (…) The anger of the play reflects Albee’s rebellion against a culture whose identity greatly transformed during his youth” (42).  Because Edward Albee had written Virginia Woolf just as the Cuban Missile crisis came to a close, we see in a young couple’s demoralization throughout the evening with their newfound friends; we see the self–imploding of the fragile American dream and the reflection of the terrifying warning towards American optimistic existence the Cuban missile crisis had been.  Edward Albee falls victim in his portrayals of women to the point where critics accuse them of being substitutes for what he, as a writer born gay, critics would suspect he would want to be: men.  But Honey and Martha are not the gay man’s portrait of a woman. They are brilliantly sensitive depictions of ladies both straight and gay men would come across the street any day. The community–authored Wikipedia supports the existence of this conflict that other gay writers face by acknowledging it as simple trivia: “Because of the dark, unflattering glimpse of heterosexual married life, many critics at the time suggested the play was a thinly veiled portrait of two gay male couples. Albee (who himself is openly gay) has adamantly denied this, stating to a number of interviewers over the years, "If I'd wanted to write a play about two gay couples, I would have done so."  Thus, the environment Albee lived in as well as Albee’s person influenced his works.  

            Similar to my discussion starter on the first topic, I will begin on the specific genre constructs that made Albee’s Virginia Woolf play by elaborating on my previous ideas to what genre the play “fit” in to.  Initially seeing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I came away with the general impression it had the makings to be a tragedy.  However, I suspected comedic elements were infused to make the struggles of these characters “easier to approach” from the audience’s perspective.  For example, during Act Two of Virginia Woolf, when George reveals to Nick and Honey that his wife Martha has an “ugly talent,” (being Martha’s ability to reveal George’s murderous past) Martha’s exclamation as she begins to tell George’s story injects comedic word-play into Act 2, Walpurgisnacht: “Well, Georgie-boy had lots of big ambitions in spite of something funny in his past…. (…) Which Georgie-boy here turned into a novel… His first attempt and also his last…. Hey! I rhymed! I rhymed!” (133).  Immediately after, however, the play returns to a similar pattern of characters forming and reforming teams to bully characters found in Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a play often classified by many to be a tragicomedy (which The Bedford Introduction to Drama defines as “[combining] elements of tragedy and comedy. (…) Tragicomedies often include a serious plot in which the expected tragic catastrophe is replaced by a happy ending” (1804).  While Virginia Woolf does not follow this definition entirely, within Albee’s writing, the barriers of the tragic genre and the comedy genre are no constriction for his characters.  For example characters are traditional comedy in certain lines, but a few lines over, they return to emotionally destroy the opposing character with another brand of comedy that makes the audience feel uncomfortable. 

            In conclusion, due to Albee’s life experiences influencing his genre constructs in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it is safe to say that the play was not written as a recipe; that is, he did not write it formulaically, “with three parts tragedy and one dash of comedy”.  What I would like to learn next would be from Edward Albee (as he is still living) or from an experimentalist production of Virginia Woolf that strays from the usual minimalist style of early Edward Albee (e.g. The Zoo Story). I would want to learn from him the art of designing interesting characters in a minimalist environment.

Works Cited

Albee III, Edward Franklin. “Walpurgisnacht.” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A Play. New York: Atheneum, 1963. 133.   

Jacobus, Lee A. The Bedford Introduction To Drama. 5th. ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2005. 1804

Roudané, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The Cambridge Companion To Edward Albee. Ed. Stephen Bottoms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 42.   

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 2006. Wikimedia Foundations, Inc., 14 Jun. 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who’s_Afraid_of_Virginia_Woolf>.