welcometonightvale

Announcing the next book club: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Added 2025-08-04 00:13:09 +0000 UTC

Hey, so let's do a classic of contemporary drama. If you're a theater kid, you've read or seen this play before, and probably the Mike Nichols film, too. Same same. But listen, I love this play. I love Edward Albee for what he can do with language in dialogue. And I can't get enough of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and I'm just dying to talk to people about it.

Months ago, we covered Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing). Eno was in Albee's playwriting program at the University of Houston years and years ago, and in the same way you can see the influence of Eno's style on Night Vale, you can see the influence of Albee's style on Eno. Absurd, mean, funny, and aggressive.

If you haven't ever read this play before, I cannot encourage you enough to go in as blind as you can.

Also: play scripts can be difficult to read, even if you're a theater-maker, so if you're feeling like you can't quite get the gist, just google clips of the movie and you'll get a great sense of how these characters can interact. I think that's a decent cheatcode.

So go find a copy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and join the talk next week!

Here's the reading/discussion schedule:

Monday, August 11: Act I - Fun and Games
Monday, August 18: Act II - Walpurgisnacht
Monday, August 25: Act III - The Exorcism

Can't wait to talk to y'all next week about this masterpiece of emotional horror.

-jeffrey