IN EDWARD ALBEE'S Tiny Alice QUALITIES PROMINENT IN Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are heightened further: cruelty, concern with reality and illusion, and an undertone that seems allegorical but that refuses to yield a meaning. These qualities present a problem, because if a play seems allegorical, yet its sense remains hidden as we look for a motive that will justify the drawn-out presentation of cruelty in it, we may be forced to regard the whole as nihilistic mystification. Various critics have judged Virginia Woolf in this way, among them Tom F. Driver, Alfred Chester and Diana Trilling. From this viewpoint Tiny Alice can be dealt with even more summarily than Virginia Woolf; it has been dismissed as an exercise in cold malice and preciosity. But like Virginia W oolf Tiny A lice has also been praised, sometimes on the basis of non-realistic elements that have caused critics to regard it as unmotivated.