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    A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
    A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
    A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
    Ebook40 pages43 minutes

    A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535842945
    A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

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      A Study Guide for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - Gale

      2

      Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

      Edward Albee

      1962

      Introduction

      Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s first full-length play and his first to appear on Broadway, is considered by many to be his greatest dramatic achievement, as well as a central work in the contemporary American theatre. Virginia Woolf focuses on an embittered academic couple who gradually draw a younger couple, freshly arrived from the Midwest, into their vicious games of marital love-hatred. The play is a dramatic bloodsport fought with words rather than weapons—verbal fencing, wrote Ruby Cohn in Edward Albee, in the most adroit dialogue ever heard on the American stage. The play premiered October 13, 1962, at New York’s Billy Rose Theatre and starred, in the roles of the battling husband and wife, Arthur Hill as George and Uta Hagen as Martha. The acclaimed production ran for 664 performances and led almost immediately to other successful productions throughout the United States and the world; the play has continued to be revived frequently.

      Virginia Woolf garnered an impressive collection of awards, including the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Foreign Press Association Award, two Antoinette Perry (Tony) Awards, the Variety Drama Critics’ Poll Award, and the Evening Standard Award. For the play, Albee was additionally selected as the most promising playwright of the 1962-63 Broadway season by the New York Drama Critics’ organization. When Albee did not receive the Pulitzer Prize for his widely-acclaimed play because one of the trustees objected to its sexual subject matter, drama advisors John Gassner and John Mason Brown publicly resigned from the jury in protest.

      Author Biography

      Edward Albee, numbered among the United States’s most acclaimed and controversial playwrights, was born March 12, 1928. As the adopted son of Reed and Frances Albee, heirs to the fortune of American theater manager Edward Franklin Albee, he had an early introduction to the theatre. He began attending performances at the age of six and wrote a three-act sex farce when he was twelve. Albee attended several private and military schools and enrolled briefly at Connecticut’s Trinity College from 1946-47. He held a variety of jobs over the next decade, working as a writer for WNYC-radio, an office boy for an advertising agency, a record salesman, and a messenger for Western Union. He wrote both fiction and poetry as a young man, achieving some limited success, and at the age of thirty returned to writing plays, making an impact with his one-act The Zoo Story (1959). Over the next few years Albee continued to

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