our has a chance to get on television too. Their questions are often rude by conventional standards and reinforce the host's requests for more potentially entertaining details. Their advice ranges from merely simplistic, under the circumstances, to misleading and erroneous. For example, in a recent Sally Jessy Raphael Show entitled "When Your Best Friend Is Sleeping With Your Father," the daughters on stage were advised to "just love them both and accept the situation." The most problematic part of this is the generally nonjudgmental tenor of the dialogue. Society's conventions are flouted with impunity, and the hidden message is that the way to get on television is to be as outrageous and antisocial as possible. The 20 million home viewers have no direct contact, physically, with the social situation in the studio. Home viewers can be listening to people recounting concentration camp horrors while popping a frozen dinner into the microwave. The ordinary, everyday world of the home audience is made bizarre by the contrasting tales of horror and woe they are only half listening to. The viewer has two basic options: He or she can, like the hero of Nathanael West's tragic Miss Lonelyhearts, go crazy listening to these stories of hideous pain and pathology. Or he or she must become inured, apathetic, or amused, or, to use the darkly delicious German word schadenfreude, he or she may get a deep sense of glee at another's misfortunes. People come into view, talk, cry, disappear, and in between we watch the commercials for consumer products that promise to improve our lives. Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? revolves around the seemingly out-of-place confessions by a husband and wife of their most private life together to two guests in their home who are virtual strangers. Traditional expectations of polite formalities and barriers are constantly breached within the action of the play. The husba...
