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INTERVIEWER
Incidentally, when did the title Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occur to you?
ALBEE
There was a saloon—it’s changed its name now—on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place . . . 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.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, James Thurber, Tennessee Williams, Bertolt Brecht, Noël Coward, Elia Kazan, Marcel Proust, James Purdy, Sophocles |
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