Living Life Without False Illusions

Photo: Amy Morton, Carrie Coon, Madison Dirks and Tracy Letts
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

Missing the Boat

"All my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done. I find that most people spend too much time living as if they're never going to die. They skid through their lives. Sleep through them sometimes. Anyway, there are only two things to write about —life and death."

~ Edward Albee, from “Edward Albee and the Road Not Taken,” by David Richards, New York Times, June 16, 1991