At the outset of his long, ever-evolving career as a dramatist, Edward Albee was an American heir to the intellectual energies of the European Theater of the Absurd. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, first staged in 1962, Albee moved his ferocity out of the absurd into a more realistic setting, a faculty home in which an embittered husband and wife unleash their demons with a venomous urgency that spotlights the disturbing characteristics of the author’s vision of family pathology. It’s like Albee has staged The Bacchae in our living room: We see the violence that simmers beneath the veneer of our lives erupt among familiar furnishings.