Tiny Alice first opened in New York in 1964 and soon appeared, with the inclusion of material that had been deleted for the stage, in book form. Albee’s publisher asked him to provide a preface to the published play. Albee instead wrote an Author’s Note in which he explained that many had hoped that he would clarify ‘‘obscure points in the play— explaining my intention, in other words. I have decided against creating such a guide because I find—after reading the play over—that I share the view of even more people: that the play is quite clear.’’ Despite Albee’s affirmative words, many contemporary audiences and critics were unsure what to make of Tiny Alice or what the play, in fact, meant. Within a month after its opening, the play had already garnered a mass of reviews, many enthusiastic, that awarded kudos to Albee for his literary technique, language, and audacity. The controversy over Tiny Alice, however, which continues to the present day, had begun. Contradictory statements— often in the same review—were rampant. Theater critics ran the gamut of calling Albee’s work ‘‘a masterpiece’’ that ‘‘established Albee as the most distinguished American playwright to date’’ to ‘‘pretentious’’ and ‘‘willfully obscure’’ to ‘‘a set trap that has no bait.’’ The reviewer for Newsweek, for example, while admitting that Tiny Alice was a ‘‘thoroughly confused play,’’ also found that it contained unique ‘‘scenes that break down the walls of reticence and safety . . . [of] the commercial theater.’’

One element that many reviews had in common was a noticeable refusal to attempt to explicate the drama they had witnessed. Henry Hewes, writing for the Saturday Review, was a notable exception. Hewes openly interpreted action and character in the play and even boldly stated what he believed to be misinterpretations on the part of other reviewers. In the same issue of Saturday Review was a psychiatrist’s ‘‘look’’ at Tiny Alice by Abraham N. Franzblau. Franzblau asserted that the reason viewers were so ‘‘disturbed,’’ ‘‘puzzled,’’ and ‘‘fascinated’’ by the play, simultaneously, was that ‘‘Albee penetrates the superficial layers of our conscious personality and, using the mysterious escalators of the unconscious, reaches the citadels of our private certainties and shoots them full of questions marks.’’

Reviewers certainly understood that Albee raised issues of the nature of faith and evil, but they immediately engaged in controversial debates over the play’s meaning. Some reviewers contended that it was an allegory. Others advised to look for deeply embedded clues, such oblique references to homosexuality as Julian the Apostate and even Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Albee biographer and scholar Richard E. Amacher wrote in his study of the author, Edward Albee, that the play was ‘‘subjected to a confusion of interpretation by the critics’’ because they ‘‘refused to accept it on its own surrealistic terms.’’

Certainly, the body of Albee’s work up to the production of Tiny Alice included works that challenged the audience with authorial messages about social relationships, the connection between love and aggression, loss and isolation, illusion and reality, and the concept of God. In the words of Leonard Casper, writing in 1983—almost twenty years after the play was first staged—‘‘Tiny Alice has continued to be considered exceptionally difficult.’’

Scholars have often looked at the play as an allegory. Harold Clurman was one of the earliest critics to make a definitive statement about Tiny Alice; he was cited in Caspar’s ‘‘Tiny Alice : The Expense of Joy in the Persistence of Mystery,’’ as calling it an allegory in which ‘‘the pure person in our world is betrayed by...