Text, Subtext and Performance: Edward Albee on Directinig Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“Who's afraid of the Tanks?” proclaimed the headline of the Lithuanian daily, Lietuvas Rytas , in its review of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Vilnius in April 1990, six weeks into the nation's tumultous declaration of independence that had brought Soviet tanks onto city streets. Seizing the fundamental point of the play – the need to destroy illusion and face reality without fear – Lithuanian audiences saw a distinct analogy with their national situation that demanded they forswear dreams of some painless future solution and confront the reality of Soviet military intervention. Their grasp of the play, despite cultural chasms and the vagaries of simultaneous translation, testified to the clarity of Albee's staging of this classic of the American theatre.