“Few playwrights… have been so frequently and mischievously misunderstood, misrepresented, overpraised, denigrated, and precipitately dismissed.”
– C. W. E. Bigsby
“Albee’s is an affirmative vision of human experience… In the midst of a dehumanizing society, Albee’s heroes, perhaps irrationally, affirm living.”
– Matthew C. Roudané
“[Condensation] of [his] work reveals Albee’s consistent and enduring concern with loss…. ‘Pain is understanding,’ says someone in [Albee’s play] ‘Counting the Ways.’ ‘It’s really loss.’ Yes. These plays are all about loss…[about] the chasm between people, [and] their inability to connect except through pain.”
– Sylvie Drake
“[Albee] is exemplifying or demonstrating a theme. That theme is the enormous and usually insuperable difficulty that human beings find in communicating with each other. More precisely, it is about the maddening effect that the enforced loneliness of the human condition has on the person who is cursed (for in our society it undoubtedly is a curse) with an infinite capacity for love.”
– George Wellwarth
“In [Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] the author parodies the ideals of western civilization…. Thus, romantic love, marriage, sex, the family, status, competition, power – all the ‘illusions’ man has erected to eliminate the differences between self and others and to escape the… burden of his freedom and loneliness come under attack.”
– James P. Quinn
“Albee is saying [in this play] that despite all the hasty bickering, the fierce hostility and the mutual misunderstandings which separate us, we need one another. We cry out in agony when we are cut off.”
– Harold Clurman
