The 941 Book CL-B: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
July 10th, 2009 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Arts, Books, Editor's Desk
It’s taken me almost a month to polish off the next entry in my ongoing 941 Book CL-B, and the reason is simple: Dude’s name is Jacques Derrida. After finishing off Milan Kundera’s Immortality, I had committed to next reading my second book by the abstruse philosopher, Margins of Philosophy, and I made it about a third of the way in before deciding I needed a quick-hitting break before I wade back into the depths of French theory. And what better way to step away from dense, winding sentences than to dive into the sharp edges of a contemporary theater script?
And so I began reading Edward Albee’s 1961 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a book I had picked up, honestly, because I had recently read a book by Virginia Woolf, and because I am really lagging at expanding my knowledge of contemporary theater.
Who’s Afraid lives up to the promise of whip-crack dialogue: What really establishes Albee’s theme is the violent back-and-forth between the four protagonists. Pretty quickly, we know that things are not peachy keen between either of the two married couples at the center of the piece. By page 14, Martha is yelling at her husband, George: “You make me puke!”
Domestic bliss = not on Albee’s agenda.
The night wears on, of course, and painful truths are paraded in front of strangers in order to inflict maximum harm, till the tension builds to a surprising-if-not-exactly-Usual-Suspects twist ending. Judging a play by its script alone is a bit iffy, so I don’t want to get too deeply into the merits of the work, but the read was powerful, and it felt good to fill in a major hole in my knowledge of current theater. I’ve got Harold Pinter on my bookshelf, too, and I’m looking forward to plugging another hole with that one. And yes, I will finish Derrida in the meantime.
Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B:
- Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy
- James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name
- What will land on this list next? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo? Saul Bellow’s Herzog? Sophocles? Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions? Harold Pinter’s Betrayal? Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove? You won’t know unless you tune in, so to speak, next time.
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