Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee’s first full-length play and Broadway debut, was a direct assault on a lifeless and shallow commercial American theater, igniting a new excitement and vitality by its radical style and content. A few months before it opened Albee published a scathing attack in the New York Times asserting that Broad-way was the true theater of the absurd because of its slavish devotion to the superficial and the unchallenging. performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night). The Broadway opening of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on October 13, 1962, certainly qualifies as one of the key dates in American drama, comparable to March 31, 1945, and Decem(the Broadway premieres of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire), Febru(the opening of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman), and Novem(the first U.S. Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee It is, in Albee’s repertory, what Long Day’s Journey into Night is in O’Neill’s the aberrations, the horrors, the mysteries are woven into the fabric of a perfectly normal setting so as to create the illusion of total realism, against which the abnormal for the first time, the “third voice of poetry” comes through loud and strong with no trace of static. Albee’s experimentation in allegory, metaphorical clichés, grotesque parody, hysterical humor, brilliant wit, literary allusion, religious undercurrents, Freudian reversals, irony on irony, here for the first time appear as an organic whole in a mature and completely satisfying dramatic work. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is in many important respects a “first.” In addition to being the first of Albee’s full-length plays, it is also the first juxtaposition and integration of realism and abstract symbolism in what will remain the dramatic idiom of all the full-length plays. Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?