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Edward Albee . (b. 1928). Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Summary
Act One. Fun and Games.
The play opens in a living-room of a house on the campus of a small New England college. As the audience later learns, it is some time after the end of the Second World War. It is two oclock in the morning. Martha and George, a married middle-aged couple, arrive from a faculty party. Their conversation reveals a tense but loving relationship. Martha teasingly tortures her husband by her constant demanding of the name of one film she cannot recall. George treats his wife patiently, not rising his voice once, for which he is shouted at by Martha and called a fool. Martha announces that they are to have guests. Honey and Nick, a young couple, arrive. They are served drinks. George tries to cover his wifes improper behaviour and bad language. Honey asks Martha to show her to the bathroom and the women absent themselves. Alone with Nick, George asks Nick strange questions about his employment at the college, much to the uneasiness of the latter. Nick remains polite, though George shows disrespect towards both Nick and Honey, not even listening to Nicks answers. The women are back. Martha has changed into an attractive dress which emphasizes her voluptuous curves. Nick is impressed. The company keeps on drinking. Martha picks a flirtation with Nick, starting a conversation on his athletic body. Honey happens to mention Marthas son about whom Martha talked when they were in the bathroom. George had warned Martha before the arrival of the guests not to talk about their son. With reference to Nicks occupation, the company discusses genetic engineering in human beings. Martha starts telling the story of her and Georges marriage. She expresses her disgust at Georges lack of personality and leadership qualities which prevent him from succeeding as the president of the college. George gets angry and breaks a bottle. He starts singing Whos afraid of Virginia Woolf and the others drunkenly join him.
Analysis
Form and Style
The play consists of three acts with separate titles. There is no exposition in the traditional sense, the audience learns about the characters and their relations only through various hints scattered throughout the dialogue. Much of the plays effect lies in its use of language: in Act I e.g. Marthas fury to engage her husband by
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provoking him to reaction, Georges failing attempts to deliver private jokes which are not comprehended by Nick, or Nick and Georges unsuccessful try at a polite conversation during the absence of their wives. The whole play is in the vein of the existential theatre and the theatre of the absurd. The title of the play comes from the recurrent motif of the little song which is sung several times as a joke.
Characters
All of the characters are academics engaged with a provincial university. Martha, aged fifty-two, is a daughter of the universitys president. She is boisterous, naughty and fond of using vulgar language. George, aged forty-six, is Marthas husband and teaches in the History Department. He is quiet, calm and with a strong sense of dry humour. Honey and Nick are newcomers to the college. Honey, aged twenty-six, is timid, frail and rather childish. Nick, aged thirty, is Honeys husband and teaches in the Biology Department. He is extremely polite, civil and the most uneasy of the characters.
Criticism
(From Bercovitch) The play offers an insight into what the author sees as a collective failure of national will. This is suggested also by the names of the couple, named for the first president and his wife. The history of George and Marthas relationship reenacts a national history of betrayed values, failed dreams and dissipated ambition. The betrayal is born of a nations preference for dream over reality, of elevating a dream to the status of a national icon, of preferring myth to substance. George and Martha are childless, but unable to accept such a bleak reality, they invent a fantasy son. This fiction is designed to give meaning and direction to their lives but it divides them instead. They are out of touch with reality and out of touch with one another. The occasion of the play is the eve of the twenty-first birthday of the invented son, who is so to attain his majority. Since he has grown in real time, the fantasy child is about to selfdestruct, the play is about to end. George and Martha substitute performance for being, they are actors who invent their own play. They reduce themselves to characters in a drama and perform in front of an audience, Nick and Honey, who are themselves conscious of their role. The play ends with the death of the fantasy son and with George and Martha deprived of their function, bereft of an audience. Stripped of pretence, they have the chance to reach out to each other and confront the painful world.
Works Cited
Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). NY: Penguin, 1965. Bercovitch, Sacvan, gen. ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. VII. Cambridge: UP, 1999.
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