Virginia Woolf has gone down in literary history as one of the best women writers who ever lived, certainly a trailblazer in the 20th century.
Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse. A Room of One’s Own. Between the Acts. I mention her in the beginning of my memoir as a model of a marriage in which shared writing and publishing work bound the couple so tightly and so happily together.
So why would anyone be afraid of her?
Why would Edward Albee have written a play with that title, a play that turned out to be a huge Broadway hit (1962) and then a highly successful film (1966) and is now the subject of a new book, Cocktails with George and Martha, just reviewed in the New York Times Book Review on February 18, 2024? What did he mean by it?
As Albee described it, the idea for the title of the play, which has virtually nothing to do with anything related to Virginia Woolf, either in her real life or her written works, came from a mirror in a Greenwich Village bar.
Yes, a basement mirror in a saloon on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverley Place, where Albee went to drink a beer in the early 1950s and saw it, written in white soap across the mirror: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It was a large mirror where graffiti was often scrawled. Or so Albee described the incident to William Flanagan in an interview in The Paris Review in the Fall of 1966, the two of them meeting at Albee’s modest house on the ocean in Montauk on Long Island.
The title is a word play on “who’s afraid of the big bad wolf — who’s afraid of living without false illusions, as Albee described it to Flanagan. “When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again,” he said.
The lead characters, George and Martha, live in a university town, and George is on the faculty, and the question, Albee said, “did strike me as being a rather typical university, intellectual joke.”
So the title did fit in with the play’s theme in a way, even though it has little, if anything, to do with the famous English writer.
What I love about the title, and Albee’s having chosen it, is that it feels so random, so subconscious in a way, so free. Good writing, superior writing of the kind Albee did as a playwright, is always a combination of great discipline and great freedom — having a strong sense of what you’re trying to do, and then winging it.
Sort of like life.
I wish there were more big mirrors with inspired soap writing on them everywhere.
I always wondered why that title! Thank you!