The film version of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night, directed by Sidney Lumet, opened in movie theaters the same week as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway. Albee claimed that Virginia Woolf owes a thematic debt to O’Neill, the older playwright, who wrote characters that cannot survive without their illusions. Both Friedan and Yates are among Albee’s generation of writers and intellectuals who questioned those illusions—the pretenses of society that function as emotional armor. “Virginia Woolf says get rid of them,” Albee said, in contrast to O’Neill. “My play is about people of more than average intelligence getting to the point where they can’t any longer exist with a whole series of games, tricks, and false illusions, and then knocking down the entire untenable superstructure. The end result? Something may or may not be built in its place.”
Nancy Kelly, who would later star as Martha in the national tour of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, remembered Walter Kerr passing the Billy Rose Theatre every day and hearing couples in line to buy tickets bickering about which one was dragging the other to see the play. “He said that the play comes to life outside the theater,” she recalled. “Albee always said that Act Four of the play was when the audience leaves the theatre, and the couples argue all the way home.”
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