Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee that opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. In the play, a Martha and George, a bitter erudite couple, invite a new professor and his wife to their house after a party and then continue drinking and engage in relentless, scathing verbal and sometimes physical abuse in front of them. Martha is the daughter of the president of the university where George works as a history professor; Nick is the biology professor whom Martha insists teaches math, and his brandy-abusing wife Honey.
Nick and his wife are fascinated and embarrassed, and stay even when the abuse turns periodically towards them as well.
Plot summary
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
Throughout the play, there are many darker veins running through the dialogue, with recurring themes suggesting the border between created fiction and reality is continually challenged.
The play involves the two couples playing "games", which are not exactly games in the conventional sense but are, in a sense, savage verbal acts against one or two of the others at the party. These games are referred to with sarcastically alliterative names, "Humiliate the Host", "Get the Guests", and so on.
Martha, in the first act, Fun and Games, taunts George in stressing his failures, in an almost brutal fashion, even after George exhibits violence:
- Martha: ...In fact, he was sort of a ... a FLOP! A great...big...FLOP!
- [CRASH! Immediately after FLOP! George breaks a bottle against the portable bar...]
- George [almost crying]: I said stop, Martha
- Martha: I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You don't want to waste good liquor...not on your salary
In Walpurgisnacht, the next act, Nick and George are alone, talking. Nick talks about his wife Honey and her snapdragons in his hand, calling out "Flores par los muertes" (flowers for the dead, in a reference to A Streetcar Named Desire). Martha and George argue about whether the moon is up or down: George insists it is up while Martha says she saw no moon from the bedroom. George then continues to say how he was in the Mediterranean when the moon went down and came up again: Nick asks whether it was after George killed his parents:
- George [defiantly]: Maybe.
- Martha: Yeah; maybe not, too.
- ...
- George [to Nick]: Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference...?
George calls Nick to bring back his wife for the final game, "bringing up baby". George and Martha supposedly have a son, which George has instructed Martha to keep quiet about to which she failed. George starts to talk about this son, how "Martha...climbing all over the poor bastard, trying to break the bathroom door down to wash him in the tub when he's sixteen," then George prompting Martha for her "recitation", in which they describe their son's upbringing in an almost duet-like fashion:
- Martha: It was an easy birth...
- George: Oh, Martha; no. You laboured...how you laboured.
- Martha: It was an easy birth...onece it had been...accepted, relaxed into
As this progresses, George begins to recite sections of the Dies Irae (part of the Requiem, the Latin mass for the dead), and in the end:
- George: Martha...our son is...dead.
- [Silence.]
- He was...killed...late in the afternoon...
- [Silence.]
- [A tiny chuckle] on a country road, with his learner's permit in his pocket, he swerved, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a ...
- Martha [rigid fury]: YOU...CAN'T...DO...THAT!
But - if their son was real, what has George supposed to have done? The circumstances of their son's death was touched on before, though in a different context. "Truth and illusion...Who knows the difference?"
George and Martha in fact have created their son; he does not exist as George and Martha could not have children. George says that he "killed" their son because Martha broke their rule that she could not speak of their son to others - but George also says that "it was...time". The play ends on a slightly less dark note, with George singing "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf" to Martha.
Film
A film adaptation of the play was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It was released in 1966. The film version differs slightly from the play. The play features only the four characters listed above while in the film there are two other characters, the host of an inn who appears briefly and says a few lines, and his wife, who serves a tray of drinks and leaves silently. In the play, each scene takes place in Martha and George's house while in the film, a few scenes take place at the inn and outside the house.
Each of the four main actors were nominated for an Oscar but only Taylor and Sandy Dennis (playing the mousy wife) won for Best Actress and Supporting Actress, respectively. The film also won for Black and White Cinematography and is consistently on the top 250 films list at the Internet Movie Database.
The film is considered groundbreaking for the having a level profanity and sexual implication unheard of at that time. At the time, Jack Valenti, who had just taken over as president of the MPAA in 1966, had just thrown out the old Hayes code. In order for the film to be released with the MPAA approval, the releasing studio Warner Brothers agreed to minor deletions of certain profanities and to have a special warning placed on all advertisement indicating adult content in the film. It was this film and another groundbreaking film, Blowup, that lead Jack Valenti to begin work on the MPAA film rating system that went into effect in 1968.
Memorable dialogue
- George: Martha, in my mind you are embedded in cement right up to the neck. No, up to the nose, it's much quieter.
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- Martha: (talking about her husband) I actually fell for him--it--that there.
- George: Martha's a romantic at heart.
- Martha: Pansies! Rosemary! Violence! My wedding bouquet!
