Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Broadway Show

Theatre	Billy Rose Theatre
Opening night	October 13, 1962
Tony nominations	7
Tony awards	6
Author(s)	Edward Albee
Director	Alan Schneider
Leading original cast members	Uta Hagen Arthur Hill Melinda Dillon George Grizzard
Closing night	May 16, 1964

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee that opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theater on October 13, 1962. The original cast featured Uta Hagen as Martha, Arthur Hill as George, Melinda Dillon as Honey and George Grizzard as Nick. It was directed by Alan Schneider. Subsequent cast members included Henderson Forsythe, Eileen Fulton, Mercedes McCambridge and Arthur Hill.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962-63 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It was also selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama by that award's committee. However, the committee's selection was overruled by the award's advisory board, the trustees of Columbia University, because of the play's then-controversial use of profanity and sexual themes.

1 Overview
2 Plot summary
3 2004-2007 production
4 Film
5 Trivia
6 Notes
7 External links
- 7.1 Reviews

[edit] Overview

In the play, Martha and George, a bitter erudite couple, invite a new professor and his wife to their house after a party. Martha is the daughter of the president of the university where George works as a history professor. Nick is a biology professor who Martha insists should teach math, and Honey is his mousy, brandy-abusing wife. Once at home, Martha and George continue drinking and engage in relentless, scathing verbal and sometimes physical abuse in front of Nick and Honey. Nick and Honey are simultaneously fascinated and embarrassed, and stay even though the abuse turns periodically towards them as well.

The play's title is a parody of the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Disney's animated version of The Three Little Pigs. (However, since obtaining the rights to using the music of this song would have been astronomically expensive, most stage versions (and the film) have Martha sing it to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush," which fits the meter fairly well and is in the public domain.) It is revealed in the first few moments of the play that Martha coined the phrase earlier on in the evening at a party. Martha and George repeatedly needle each other over whether either one of them found it funny.

The idea for the play's title came to Albee from a line of graffiti he saw scrawled on a mirror in a bar.

I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who's afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.

— Edward Albee^[1]

In interviews, Albee has said that he asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use her name in the title of the play.

There are many darker veins running through the play's dialogue which suggest that the border between fiction and reality is continually challenged. The play ends with Martha answering the titular question of who is afraid to live their life free of illusions with, "I am, George, I am." Implicitly, exposure is something everyone fears; facade (be it social or psychological), although damaging, provides a comfort.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The play involves the two couples playing "games," which are savage verbal attacks 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.

[edit] "Humiliate the Host"

Martha, in the first act, "Fun and Games", taunts George. She stresses his failures in an almost brutal fashion, even after George reacts violently:

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 act two, "Walpurgisnacht", Nick and George are alone. Nick talks about his wife and her hysterical pregnancy:

George [to Nick]: While she was up, you married her.

Nick: And then she went down.

George tells Nick a story about a boy who accidentally shot and killed his mother. Later, this boy was driving in the countryside with his father, when the boy "with his learner's permit in his pocket...swerved the car, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a large tree...when they told him that his father was dead...he was put in an asylum." This all occurs very early in the second act, but references to this story occur later in the play.

Once the men are rejoined by their wives, Martha begins to describe a novel that George wrote recently: "A novel about a naughty boychild...who killed his mother and his father dead." Martha continues: "Georgie said...but Sir, it isn't a novel at all...this really happened...TO ME!" At this time, George and Martha begin to physically fight one another and George grabs Martha by the throat. In his stage direction, Albee suggests that Nick may be making a connection between the "novel" and the story George had told him earlier.

Nick [remembering something related]: Hey...wait a minute...

Is George the boy who "killed his mother and his father dead"? If so, was he lying to Nick about the asylum or is the "asylum" something metaphorical? Perhaps it is having ended up in the crazy house that he and Martha maintain? Is Martha lying about the novel, or is something else afoot? Or, perhaps, was George an observer or some sort to these events (for instance the father, making this all a metaphor for his and Martha's rather imaginary son)? The truth is not evident. This brutal event concludes the game of "Humiliate the Host."

[edit] "Get the Guests"

George is quick to retort in the next game, "Get the Guests." While Nick and George were talking earlier, Nick related the story of his and Honey's marriage. Honey, now thoroughly drunk, realizes that George's story about "the Mousie", who "tooted brandy immodestly and spent half of her time in the upchuck", is about her and her hysterical pregnancy. She feels as if she is about to be sick and runs to the bathroom.

At the end of this act, Martha starts to seduce Nick blatantly in front of George. George does not react and sits calmly, reading a book:

Martha: ...I said I was necking with one of the guests...

George: Yes, good...good for you. Which one?

Martha: Oh, I see what you're up to, you lousy little...

George: I'm up to page a hundred and...

At the end of the act, Honey comes out, hearing Martha and Nick brush against the doorchimes, wondering who rang. This gives George an idea, and leads into the next, crucial act of the play.

[edit] "Bringing Up Baby"

In the third act, Martha appears alone on the stage, speaking in soliloquy. Nick joins her after a while, recalling Honey in the bathroom winking at him. The doorbell rings: It is George, with a bunch of snapdragons in his hand, calling out, "Flores para los muertos" (flowers for the dead, in a reference to A Streetcar Named Desire). Martha and George argue about whether the moon is up or down (possibly a Macbeth reference) : George insists it is up while Martha says she saw no moon from the bedroom. George then goes on to say how once, when he was in the Mediterranean, the moon went down and came up again. Nick asks whether this incident occurred after George killed his parents:

George [defiantly]: Maybe.

Martha: Yeah; maybe not, too.

...

George [to Nick]: Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference...?

George asks Nick to bring his wife back out for the final game, "Bringing Up Baby." George and Martha supposedly have a son, about whom George has repeatedly instructed Martha to keep quiet. George now begins to talk about this son - "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 prompts 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...once it had been...accepted, relaxed into.

As this tale 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!

Supposing their son had been real, what had George done to prompt this response from Martha? The circumstances of their son's death were touched on earlier in the play in a different context.

George and Martha 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. The play ends with George singing, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to Martha, whereupon she replies, "I am, George... I am".

[edit] 2004-2007 production

Starting in 2004 and continuing into 2005, there was a new Broadway production of the play. The production was directed by Anthony Page and starred Kathleen Turner as Martha and Bill Irwin as George. Irwin won the 2005 Tony award for Best Actor for his role. The production was transferred to London's West End with the entire original cast, and as of March 2006 was playing at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. In January 2007, the Turner-Irwin production was performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., for a month-long run. On February 6, 2007, the production began a six-week run at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is on tour in the US and is currently playing at the LaSalle Bank Theatre in Chicago from March 27 to April 7, 2007.

[edit] Film

Main article: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film)

A film adaptation of the play was released in 1966. It was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Elizabeth Taylor as Martha and Richard Burton as George.

[edit] Trivia

Because of the dark, unflattering glimpse of heterosexual married life, many critics at the time suggested the play was a thinly veiled portrait of two gay male couples. Albee (who himself is openly gay) has adamantly denied this, stating to a number of interviewers over the years, "If I'd wanted to write a play about two gay couples, I would have done so." Albee has refused permission to theater companies to cast all four roles with men, saying this would distort the play's meaning.
Nick is never addressed or introduced by name. (Viewers would not know the character's name, were it not cited in the credits.) He is, however the recipient of a number of derogatory and/or unflattering nicknames from George (e.g. "stud", "houseboy", "blondie").
Indiana band Murder by Death have a song entitled I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on their first album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing.
Indie pop band of Montreal reference Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in their song The Past is a Grotesque Animal from their 2007 release Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?.
A 1990s stage revival of the play starred John Lithgow. Though the actors were praised for their performances, the timeliness of the staging was questioned in reviews.
The movie/play was spoofed on the Seth McFarlane cartoon comedy, American Dad, in the episode "Camp Refugee," with Roger the alien playing George's part and Francine playing Martha's part.