A Metadramatic Investigation Of Edward Albee's Early Plays

Edward Albee is arguably the most influential and credited dramatist in the second half of the 20 th century.Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice,two plays about illusion and its nature with distinctive metadramatic qualities,are his first tryouts in Broadway theaters.This dissertation intends to elucidate how metadrama works in conveying Albee's ideas and themes in his early plays,with two examples of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice.The thesis begins with an introduction to Edward Albee and his two early plays: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice,literature review of his works at home and abroad,and a brief account of the theory of metadrama.Chapter One deals with the play within the play.While the games in Who's Afraid are regarded as the play within the play,which offers a retreat for the characters from the reality,Tiny Alice puts on a Pirandellian rehearsal playlet,where the characters trespassing the boundaries between different layers of drama give the audience a sense of alienation.Role playing within the role is the focus of Chapter Two.In Who's Afraid,George metamorphizes into a variety of roles throughout the party and assumes a metadramatic quality,whereas the characters in Tiny Alice,on the contrary,is suffering from existential crisis with their fluidity of identities as manifested in their role playing.Chapter Three is concerned with “perception” in Albee's two plays,a crucial metadramatic aspect.Each play accomplishes the change of perception by way of a ritual.In Who's Afraid it is the exorcism of the fictional child that brings about a cleansing of all the four characters,while Tiny Alice offers a wedding/sacrifice ceremony where Brother Julian foregoes his self-centered perception of God and the world.Edward Albee incorporates different varieties of metadrama in his early plays.The theme and the dramaturgy challenge the traditional theater-goers in America.They are Albee's outcry to the Americans that they must quit a life full of falsities and illusions.