Albee, Edward: 1928 - 2016

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1962 - Background

  • What a dump!
    • What a dump!
      When Martha says at the beginning of Act One, "What a dump!" she quotes Bette Davis saying that same line in Beyond The Forest, a 1949 movie with Bette Davis and Joseph Cotton.
      In this movie Rosa (Bette Davis), a Loyalton, Wisconsin, mill town girl, married to the small-town Midwestern doctor, Dr. Lewis Moline, engages in an illicit, erotic love affair with a vacationing neighbor to escape her boredom.
      The film begins with a warning title: "This is the story of evil. Evil is headstrong - is puffed up. For our soul's sake, it is salutory for us to view it in all its ugly nakedness once in a while. Thus may we know how those who deliver themselves over to it end up like the Scorpion, in a mad frenzy stinging themselves to eternal death."
    • Bette Davis - What A Dump!
  • Walpurgisnacht
    • The origins of the ritual date back to pagan celebrations of fertility rites and the coming of spring.
    • Analysis: "Traditionally, on Walpurgis Night, the boundary between the rational and the irrational world dissolves; therefore, it is a terrifying time."
    • Information from Wikipedia
    • Information from Merriam-Webster
    • Die erste Walpurgisnacht by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, played by the hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra) , directed by Andrés Orozco-Estrada; Kloster Eberbach; August 22, 2014