SOURCE: "Reality and Illusion: Continuity of a Theme in Albee," in Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, March, 1973, pp. 71-9.

In the following essay, Kingsley observes how Albee's "struggle with reality and illusion endures throughout the major part of his career. "

Albee has had occasion more than once to note the prominence of reality and illusion in his work. Tiny Alice he calls "a perfectly straightforward story, dealt with in terms of reality and illusion, symbol and actuality."¹ The title of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "means who's afraid of the big bad wolf… who's afraid of living life without false illusions."² The American Dream "is an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is...