Richard Schechner, the editor of the Tulane Drama Review, greeted Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a ‘persistent escape into morbid fantasy’. Like W. D. Maxwell, a member of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, he found it a filthy play and indicted it for its ‘morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience’. More perversely he saw in the play ‘an ineluctable urge to escape reality and its concomitant responsibilities by crawling back into the womb, or bathroom, or both’. His revulsion was shared by other critics who similarly misapprehended Albee's intention in a play which, far from endorsing illusion, remorselessly peels off protective fantasies in order to reach ‘the bone…the marrow’. Indeed, as Alan Schneider, the play's Broadway director, has asked, ‘is Albee not rather dedicated to smashing that rosy view, shocking us with the truth of our present-day behaviour and thought, striving to purge us into an actual confrontation with reality?’ (my italics).
Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Julie Paulson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. ix+229.
