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Books Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Best books to read after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Readers who love Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee are drawn to its savage combination of domestic warfare, progressive revelation, and the stripping away of illusions — they want plays and novels that deal with the violence concealed in marriage, the games couples play, and the question of what people do when their illusions are taken away.
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Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
The companion in the tradition of the American family play organized around a night of progressive revelation — the Tyrones' terrible day and night of accusation. Both are the most devastating American plays about marriage and family, organized around a small group of characters moving through a night toward a terrible clarifying recognition
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The Dance of Death
by August Strindberg
The direct theatrical precursor — Edgar and Alice in their tower, playing the game of their twenty-five-year marriage. Strindberg's Edgar and Alice and Albee's George and Martha are companion couples in the tradition of the marriage as sustained combat; Albee knew Strindberg well and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the American version
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The Homecoming
by Harold Pinter
Pinter's companion in the tradition of the play about domestic power and the violence concealed in family relationships — Teddy's return with his wife Ruth to his North London family. Both are organized around an evening of escalating confrontation, both use the presence of outsiders to expose the central relationship's dynamics, and both refuse comfortable resolution
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Williams's companion in the tradition of the American play about the violence concealed in marriage — Brick, Maggie, and Big Daddy. Both plays are organized around an evening of escalating confrontation whose central question involves a man's complicity in his own damage
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Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
The companion in the American theatrical tradition — Willy Loman's illusions and their consequences. Both are companion investigations of the American family's illusions: Miller's Willy maintains illusions about his professional success; Albee's George and Martha maintain the ultimate illusion (a son who doesn't exist)
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Miss Julie
by August Strindberg
The Strindbergian companion in the tradition of the battle of the sexes — the count's daughter Julie and the valet Jean on Midsummer's Eve. Both are companion explorations of the battle between a man and a woman where the weapons are intelligence, sexuality, and cruelty, and where the apparent winner at any moment is not the actual winner
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The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's companion in the tradition of the play about people who cannot face the reality of their situation — the Ranevskaya family's inability to save the orchard. Both are plays about illusion and its dissolution: where Chekhov's characters endure illusions with elegiac acceptance, Albee's characters strip each other's illusions away in a night of deliberate violence
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A Delicate Balance
by Edward Albee
Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning companion — Tobias and Agnes's household disrupted by the arrival of their best friends Harry and Edna, overcome by an unspecified terror. The calmer, more formal companion to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: where the earlier play is organized around combat, A Delicate Balance is organized around the quieter violence of ordinary bourgeois life
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