When they expect him to become miserable they don’t say soon, I would think.

An article on the theater page of The New York Times indicates that Albee is distressed by the search that has begun for the meaning of the play the Times also reports that he is amused by it, as well. The disaster of the play, however-its tediousness, its pretentiousness, its galling sophistication, its gratuitous and easy symbolizing, its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee-all of this can be traced to his own unwillingness or inability to put its real subject at the center of the action. Like Virginia Woolf, Tiny Alice is about the triumph of a strong woman over a weak man. In this way he not only distorts his observations, but subverts his own powers, for it is not the riddles of philosophy that bring his talent to life, but the ways of cruelty and humiliation. Albee sees in human nature very much what Maupassant did, only he wants to talk about it like Plato. But this new play isn’t about the problems of faith-and-doubt or appearance-and-reality, any more than Virginia Woolf was about “the Decline of the West” mostly, when the characters in Tiny Alice suffer over epistomology, they are really suffering the consequences of human deceit, subterfuge, and hypocrisy. In Tiny Alice, the metaphysics, such as they are, appear to be Albee’s deepest concern-and no doubt about it, he wants his concerns to seem deep. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee attempted to move beyond the narrowness of his personal interests by having his characters speculate from time to time upon the metaphysical and historical implications of their predicament.

Tiny Alice by Edward Albee