SOURCE: "Text, Subtext, and Performance: Edward Albee on Directing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Rakesh Solomon, in Theatre Survey, Vol. 34, No. 2, November 1993, pp. 95-110.

The following interview was conducted in January 1990, during rehearsals for a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that Albee was directing. He here focuses on the play from the dual perspective of playwright and director.

"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.¹ 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...