Albee, Edward.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Edward Albee. Charleston, WV: The Parchment Gallery, 1980.

Broadside, 36 × 28 cm / 14 × 11 in. Printed on heavy cream stock, with facsimile line drawing by e.e. cummings. Limited issue, hand-numbered No. 64 / 100 and signed by Edward Albee in ink, dated 1980, as issued.

Fine. Clean, bright, and well preserved, with no folds; stored flat. A scarce signed literary broadside from a very small limitation.

A rare signed broadside in which Edward Albee revisits the title that changed modern American theater.

Few titles in twentieth-century literature have the force, wit, and menace of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? First produced on Broadway in 1962, Albee's play helped redefine the American stage. It brought the violence of language, the collapse of private illusion, and the hidden brutality of respectable domestic life into the center of serious theater. What begins as a late-night drawing-room encounter becomes something far more dangerous: a ritual stripping-away of fantasy, performance, marriage, and self-deception.

The title itself is one of Albee's great inventions. On the surface, it sounds like a clever literary joke, substituting Virginia Woolf for the Big Bad Wolf. Beneath that joke is the darker question at the heart of the play: who is afraid to live without illusion? In Albee's hands, "Virginia Woolf" becomes more than a name. It becomes a symbol of intellectual fear, emotional exposure, and the terrifying moment when comforting fictions can no longer protect us.

This 1980 broadside transforms that famous theatrical phrase into a collectible object. It is not merely a souvenir of the play, but a small signed work of literary art: Albee returning to the title that made him one of the defining voices of modern drama. The facsimile drawing by e.e. cummings adds another layer of modernist resonance. Cummings, like Albee, was a maker of language who broke conventional forms; his visual line gives the sheet the feeling of a conversation between two major twentieth-century artistic temperaments — Albee's theatrical severity and cummings's playful experimental energy.

That convergence is what makes the broadside especially desirable. It stands at the crossroads of modern American drama, modernist poetry, visual art, fine-press ephemera, and signed literary collecting. Issued in only 100 hand-numbered copies and signed by Albee, it has the scarcity collectors look for, the visual presence needed for framing, and the cultural significance of one of the most important titles in postwar American literature.

A compelling collector's piece: signed by Edward Albee, limited to only 100 copies, illustrated with a cummings image, and built around one of the most iconic and enduring titles in American theater.