Living Life Without False Illusions
Credit: Michael Brosilow
“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.”
~ Edward Albee, from "Edward Albee, The Art of Theater No. 4," by William Flanagan, The Paris Review, Fall 1966
