BARRON’S BOOK NOTES

EDWARD ALBEE’S

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

In 1962 the United States was enjoying what many now consider a period of innocence. John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected President, was in office, revitalizing a country some observers considered passive and complacent when he was inaugurated in 1961. Relative peace reigned in most of the world, and in the United States traditional values appeared unshakable. Hardly anyone would have predicted the great turmoil the country was about to undergo—the Vietnam War; the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.; and the scandal of Watergate that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

Yet, if the surface was tranquil in 1962, there was nonetheless considerable agitation underneath. American relations with the Soviet Union were often extremely tense in the early 1960s, resulting in confrontations over Berlin and Cuba. In the United States, attempts by blacks to end racial discrimination not infrequently were countered by violence by whites. And a number of influential writers were questioning the American values that seemed so secure.

On October 13, 1962, a play opened on Broadway in New York City that was one of the first popular successes to articulate these undercurrents of dissatisfaction, of unease about America. That play, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, critically analyzed institutions and values that Americans held dear—family, marriage, and success, for instance—and suggested they might have been created in part to escape from reality.

Albee’s play set loose a cyclone of controversy. It was the rare case of a play created for the commercial theater presenting a full-scale investigation of sacred American traditions, and it did so in shocking language that many found disturbing.

Yet for every person who found Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “perverse” and “dirty-minded,” there were those who labeled the play a masterpiece and declared Albee to be “one of the most important dramatists of the contemporary world theater.” Debate raged over the play, and opinions were even offered by people who had never seen or read it!

Who is the man who nearly turned the theater world upside down in 1962? It’s not an easy question to answer, since Edward Albee always has been an intensely private man. Anyone who looks to Albee’s life for hints about his work probably will be disappointed, for few modern writers have been so guarded about their past and protective of their privacy. In a 1981 interview Albee was asked how important his biography was as a key to understanding his work. He responded: “I think totally unimportant. I’d rather people judge the work for itself rather than by biographical attachments.”

You may not agree with Albee about how much your knowledge of an author’s life helps you understand his work, but Albee’s philosophy of allowing the work to speak for itself deserves respect.

The facts known about Albee’s early life come from the information he has made public, plus the reminiscences of longtime friends. Albee was born in Washington, D.C., on March 12, 1928, to parents whose identities are unknown. He was placed in an orphanage at birth, and at the age of two weeks he was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee, who took him to live in New York City. He was named Edward Franklin Albee after a grandfather, who was part owner of the Keith-Albee Circuit, an extremely successful string of vaudeville theaters.

The Albee family was wealthy, and young Edward’s life was one of luxury. His childhood included private tutors, servants, luxury automobiles, winters in warm climates, excursions to the theater, and riding lessons. But such privilege as a child did not result in a pampered complacency when he grew up. In fact, as you shall see, Albee used his pen to criticize the moral and spiritual damage inflicted upon people by an excess of material wealth and a misguided pursuit of the “American dream.”

The family moved around a lot, and this may have created problems for Albee’s education. He attended a variety of schools and was expelled from both a preparatory school and a military academy. He graduated from Choate, a fashionable private school in Connecticut, however. He then enrolled at Trinity College, also in Connecticut, but left after his sophomore year to begin a life on his own in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Greenwich Village in 1950 was a haven for young writers and bohemians looking for artistic freedom and inspiration. Albee’s search for independence was helped greatly by a trust fund set up for him by his grandmother. Despite the steady income (which earned him the title “the richest boy in Greenwich Village” from his friends), Albee took a variety of odd jobs: office boy, record and book salesman, writer of radio and music programs, and Western Union messenger. Some say he delivered death notices for the telegraph company, an interesting item to remember as you read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Although it has been suggested that Albee lived a rebellious and restless existence during the 1950s, some say his life was stable and comfortable. Two facts are verifiable: he loved the theater and he loved to write. (His first play, Aliqueen, was written when he was twelve.)

Just before his thirtieth birthday in 1958, after a period of unsuccessful writing, Albee wrote The Zoo Story. It was a one-act play that would eventually win him worldwide attention. Through friends, Albee had the play produced first in West Berlin, and then in twelve West German cities, where the theatrical climate was more experimental than in the United States. Thus, Albee saw The Zoo Story produced first in a language he didn’t understand!

The Zoo Story premiered in New York in 1960 at an off-Broadway theater. Word quickly spread that a writer of great promise had appeared on the scene. Albee’s reputation among knowledgeable theatergoers grew with other one-acters: The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream.

Albee’s explosion on the theatrical scene came at a time when the American commercial theater had been dominated by playwrights such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge.

These writers worked for the most part in a realistic idiom, in which the world onstage essentially mirrored the world of the audience. The world was observed objectively, and in ways that generally echoed traditional values and supported the beliefs of the audience. These plays told the members of the audience that men and women were basically responsible for determining their own fate.

Some playwrights of the time, particularly Europeans like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco, were responding differently to the world. World War II and the potential horrors of the nuclear age compelled these writers to see the universe as a place where humans had lost control. They were eager to shake audiences out of a sense of complacency about their lives. They wanted the spectator to feel their deep-seated anguish at the absurdity of the human condition. Nothing happens, nothing changes, these writers say. The world is out of control and nothing we can do will change this disturbing condition. This attitude of hopelessness prompted the critics to loosely categorize these writers as Absurdists.

Plays of the Theater of the Absurd, such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957) and Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), share certain characteristics. Speech is often deliberately confusing and not logical. The patter is filled with jargon, cliches, even nonsense, as if to tell us that language itself is empty and our attempts to communicate deep feelings are futile. Dramatic and realistic characters are frequently eliminated. The plays are often merely a series or incidents or images that represent the turmoil of the human condition as the author sees it. Also, absurdist plays are often very funny—sometimes insanely so—suggesting that laughter is the only response to the pain of life in a world devoid of hope or purpose.

Albee’s work includes both realistic and absurdist techniques. He is often seen as a link between these two movements. On one level, The Zoo Story tells of an “ordinary” meeting between two men in a park. Peter is a comfortable middle-class businessman, the upholder of traditional American values, complete with wife, children, and pets. Jerry is an outcast and a rebel, a man who has chosen to remove himself from the mainstream by living a solitary, introspective existence. The play concerns Jerry’s desire to communicate with Peter on something more than a superficial level, and when his initial attempts fail, he compels Peter to murder him, suggesting that only violence or death can bring communication at a deeper level. The themes of communication through violence and the hollowness of American values that Albee explores in The Zoo Story link him with the absurdists, as does Jerry’s death, which has been likened to the death of the student in Ionesco’s play The Lesson. (These two themes and a death surface again in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960) are short plays by Albee that deal with the same three characters: Mommy, dominating and cruel; Daddy, passive and emasculated; and Grandma, shrewd and sharp-tongued. In The Sandbox, Death comes to Grandma on the beach in the form of a handsome young man, while Mommy and Daddy bicker endlessly. The American Dream shows the family at home as they are visited by the identical twin of a child they had once adopted and then destroyed. With exaggeration and bitter parody, Albee reveals “the American Dream”—the seemingly perfect nuclear family whose polished exterior conceals cruelty, dishonesty, and hatred.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? explores themes—death, sterility, the corruption of the American dream—similar to Albee’s earlier one-act plays. In some ways this full-length play is more realistic than its predecessors. It has a recognizable setting and more commonplace characters. But the absurdist influence is there too—in the imaginary child that George and Martha have created in the characters’ inability to communicate except through abrasiveness and violence, and in the frequent use of cliched speech. It is the successful blending of realism and absurdism that has prompted audiences to applaud Albee’s innovations. Yet some readers feel that the play would be better served by a nonrealistic production, perhaps a blank stage rather than the detailed setting it’s usually given.

The controversy generated by the play’s Broadway opening reached a climax with the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, one of the most prestigious of all drama awards. The committee chosen to select the winning play voted to give the prize to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the trustees of Columbia University, the overseers of the award, decided to deny the play a Pulitzer. They perhaps felt that its explicit language and its exploration of “taboo” subjects made it too controversial a choice.

Despite its detractors, the play has continued to be performed, debated, and admired. (A successful film version starred the popular actors Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; Taylor won an Academy Award in 1966 for her portrayal of Martha.) In the seventies, there was a major Broadway revival of the play with Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara. If it has been revived less than other major plays, it may be that audiences have grown accustomed to its troubled message in an age of cynicism and nihilism. Also, the heavy demands made by the play on its cast (particularly on the actors playing George and Martha) discourage many theater companies from including it in their repertory.

Yet for those who can’t see a production of the play, the text can provide an opportunity to study Albee’s characters and language more fully. The elements of the play that were once so shocking—perhaps even offensive—seem almost tame in an era of sexual permissiveness on stage, screen and television. That the play continues to generate enormous power suggests to many playgoers and readers that Albee has indeed created an enduring masterpiece.

After Virginia Woolf, Albee continued to experiment. His next play, Tiny Alice (1964), is a dark and mysterious allegory about man’s relationship to God. In 1966 he won the Pulitzer Prize for A Delicate Balance, which tells of a “conventional” family whose lives are overturned when good friends invade their household, driven from their own home by a nameless fear. All Over (1971) details the reactions of a group of people—relatives and loved ones—to the death of a famous writer. Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968) are two interrelated one-acters. In Box there are no characters; a box sits on stage and a voice from within it speaks to the audience. In Seascape (1975), which also won a Pulitzer Prize, two of the four characters are large lizardlike creatures that emerge from the sea.

Among Albee’s other works are adaptations of novels which audiences and readers have never felt to be among his best work: Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963), James Purdy’s Malcolm (1965), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1981). Albee has even written a musical, an adaptation of Truman Capote’s short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which closed before it got to Broadway.

By the mid-1980s none of Albee’s other plays had received the critical acclaim or popular acceptance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Some people felt that his plays had become more and more inaccessible, that Albee was speaking to himself in his own coded language, with little regard for how well he communicated with the audience. Others defended him by saying that his lack of interest in the commercial theater should not be held against him, and that perhaps the test of time would prove his later works to be among his best.

What was important was that Albee, who had long disregarded the opinion of critics (“I have been both overpraised and underpraised,” he had said), kept writing. He was not content to rest on past laurels. He also gave generously of his time and energy to other artists, both as a founder of the William Flanagan Center for Creative Persons, at Montauk, New York, and as a member of national and state organizations furthering the arts. Although reluctant to talk about his life or his past, Albee was dedicated to artistic excellence and often shared his expertise with college students in lectures and seminars.

It was also clear that he had a major influence on his younger contemporaries. Evidence of his remarkable ear for dialogue, his poetic flair for the American idiom, and his cynical viewpoint on American values could be seen in the work of such playwrights as Sam Shephard (Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love), David Rabe (Streamers, Hurly-burly); John Guare (House of Blue Leaves); and David Mamet (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross).

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: THE PLOT

Late one Saturday night, a husband and wife return to their home in a New England college town. George, 46, is an associate professor of history; Martha, 52, is the daughter of the college president. They have been drinking heavily at a faculty party given by Martha’s father, and as the two stumble around the living room and bicker, they seem like many other such couples after a long and alcoholic party. But this is a night in which tensions within their marriage will erupt and the patterns of their lives may be altered forever.

To George’s surprise, Martha announces that she has invited another couple to join them for a drink—at 2 A.M.! Naturally combative, George and Martha use the invitation as another excuse to battle.

The guests arrive—Nick, 30, a new faculty member in the biology department, and his wife, Honey 26. He’s good-looking and athletic; she’s a sweet and seemingly superficial person. They quickly find themselves to be the audience for George and Martha’s scalding war of words.

As the evening progresses and the liquor flows, tensions that have been partially hidden emerge in the form of psychological games. Martha is disgusted with George’s lack of ambition and failure to advance in the history department, particularly with his advantages as the son-in-law of the university president. She treats George with open contempt, and George tries to strike back by using his superior verbal skills. He has taken an immediate dislike to Nick, not only because Martha is obviously physically attracted to the younger man, but also because Nick is a biologist. As a historian, George sees biology as a science determined to eliminate man’s individuality.

Nick tries to stay detached from the turmoil between his hosts, but he soon gets caught up in it and reveals himself as ambitious and shallow. Honey seems too drunk and too mindless to comprehend much of what is going on.

A turning point occurs when George discovers that Martha has mentioned a forbidden topic to Honey while the two women were out of the room. The taboo topic: George and Martha’s son. The bitterness between the couple accelerates, and they persist in their battle of verbal abuse. As Act I ends, Martha has figuratively twisted a knife in George’s back by harping on his supposed failure as a man and as a teacher. The fight dissolves into a shouting match and Honey is made physically ill by a combination of the quarreling and too much alcohol.

As Act II of the play opens, George and Nick talk alone. George tells the story of a young boy who killed his mother and caused his father to die, a story that may or may not be autobiographical. Nick reveals that he married Honey when she thought she was pregnant, but that the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. George’s attempts to warn Nick about being “dragged down by the quicksand” of the college fall on deaf ears. Nick has his eye set on the top, and one of his techniques for advancement will be to sleep with a few important faculty wives. Martha and Honey return, and the sexual attraction between Martha and Nick increases. They dance erotically with each other as Martha goads her husband by telling their guests of George’s attempts to write a novel, whose plot concerns a boy responsible for his parents’ deaths. Infuriated, George physically attacks Martha, stopping only when Nick intervenes. George seeks his revenge, not on Martha, but on the guests. He tells a “fable” that mirrors Nick and Honey’s early lives and her hysterical pregnancy. Humiliated, Honey flees the room. Enraged and out for blood, George and Martha declare “total war” on each other.

The first victory is Martha’s, as she openly makes sexual advances to Nick but fails to make George lose his temper. Yet after she has led the younger man to the kitchen, where George can hear the sounds of their carousing, George makes a decision that will be his final act of revenge, one that will change his and Martha’s lives forever: he decides to tell her that their son is dead.

Act III finds Martha alone. Nick has proven himself impotent in their sexual encounter, and when he arrives again on the scene, she expresses contempt for him. She also reveals to him that George is the only man who has ever satisfied her.

George appears at the front door, bearing flowers and announcing that there is one more game to play—”Bringing Up Baby.” First, he induces Martha to talk about their son in the most loving and idealized terms; then, he announces the death of their son.

Martha’s furious reaction that George “cannot decide these things” leads Nick to understand at last George and Martha’s secret. Their son is a creation of their imagination, a fantasy child that they have carefully harbored as a means of helping them survive the pain of their failed lives. Nick and Honey leave, and George and Martha are alone, with just each other as shields against the world. Only the future will tell whether they have been strengthened or made even more vulnerable by the traumatic experiences of the evening.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: GEORGE

George is an associate professor of history at a college in the New England town of New Carthage. At 46, he should probably be further along in his career, but through a lack of ambition, coupled with a bad relationship with the college president (his father-in-law), he has become “bogged down” in the history department. He’s been married to Martha, six years older than he, for 23 years, and their marriage has degenerated into an ongoing battle of words and psychological games to get the upper hand.

George is intelligent and witty, and has a keen ability to use words. In fact, he might be an excellent dinner companion if his basic energy had not been dissipated by Martha’s constant belittling of him. He fights back by using his wits, but she knows where to wound him at his most vulnerable points—his failures, his physical weakness, his passivity.

Virtually nothing is told us of George’s (or the other characters’) early life. George relates a story that he claims to be autobiographical, about a trip to a gin mill (saloon) during the Prohibition era, when he was a teenager. But there are clues to suggest that a boy in the story whom George refers to as a “friend” may actually be George himself. This boy had murdered his mother and caused the death of his father. Whether the story is literal or metaphoric is never made clear in the play, nor is it known if George is talking about himself or someone else. Whatever interpretation is accepted, however, it’s evident that George suffers from a great deal of conflict about his parents, and seems to harbor guilt and/or resentment about them.

Through most of the play Martha gets the better of George, beating him down psychologically. She is skillful at dishing out punishment, and George accepts it. He turns the tables by abusing their guests in ways similar to Martha’s treatment of him, by chiding them for their weaknesses and revealing their hidden secrets.

In the end, however, George proves himself stronger than Martha. His decision to kill their imaginary child—a fantasy he and Martha have shared privately—can be viewed as an act of heroism or as an act of revenge. Whichever approach you favor, it is clear that George is in control by the end of the play.

To some readers, George’s name suggests George Washington (an ironic comment on the corruption of American ideals); to others, it suggests St. George, the dragon slayer who conquered evil (much as George conquers the “devil” that possesses him and his wife in the form of the child fantasy).

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: MARTHA

Martha is the daughter of the college president, and one of the great conflicts of her life is that while she reveres her father, he seems to have no great love for her.

Intelligent, well-read, and perceptive, Martha hides her intellectual gifts beneath a brassy, aggressive, and vulgar exterior. She tries to dominate and control her husband for two reasons: she resents his inability to fill her father’s role, both professionally and psychologically; and George seems to enjoy the role of victim to her torturer.

Martha battles almost continuously with George as an act of attempted communication. Faced with lives filled with self-loathing, they punish each other at the same time they wish to connect. Both drink heavily, and Martha seduces a number of younger men. A self-styled “earth mother,” Martha admits that these encounters are unsatisfying; the only man who has given her true satisfaction is George. But it’s one of the tragic ironies of the play that their mutual need can never be expressed to each other.

Only when George successfully ends their fantasy of having a child does Martha admit a vulnerability and a fear of the future that she has not revealed before, but what lies ahead for her and George remains ambiguous.

Like George, Martha’s name is perhaps meant to evoke Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington. Together they can be seen as offering a wry commentary on the “perfect American couple.”

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: NICK

One of George and Martha’s guests, Nick is young (30), attractive, and physically fit. A biology professor, new to the faculty, Nick seems the ideal man, but he eventually reveals himself to have a hollow center. He is amoral, shallow, coldly ambitious. His plans to get ahead at the college include sleeping with “pertinent” faculty wives.

His willingness to be seduced by Martha, despite the presence of his wife and George, is evidence of his cynicism and lack of morals. But underneath the macho exterior is a weak and crass human being. He is impotent in his sexual encounter with Martha, and he admits to having married Honey because he thought she was pregnant and because her father was wealthy.

Nick’s profession as a biologist is contrasted to George’s as a historian. Biology in the play is viewed as the science whose practitioners are determined to toy with human genetics in order to create a race of perfect human beings. Nick therefore suggests the results of these experiments, the “wave of the future”—attractive on the outside, empty within.

Nick is the one character who comes to understand that George and Martha’s son is an imaginary creation, and his half hearted attempt to help (“I’d like to…”) suggests to some that the evening spent with George and Martha has changed him. But Albee gives no further clues as to what the future holds for Nick and Honey.

Nick’s name may suggest an old-fashioned term for the devil (“Old Nick”). Whether he’s meant to represent a literal evil that invades George and Martha’s household, or perhaps the evil of the future, is open to debate. Some readers believe his name refers to Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union at the time the play was written. Thus, Nick’s confrontations with George may suggest East vs. West, the energetic threat of Communism in contrast to decaying American ideals.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: HONEY

Nick’s wife, Honey, 26, is, on the surface, sweet, gentle, eager to make a good impression, and prudish. She is also unable to handle her liquor, so her contributions to the conversation are minor at best. Her mindlessness turns out to reveal an inability to cope with reality.

Honey shows herself on one level to be the eternal child. She defers to her husband, is easily offended, gives in to frequent bouts of vomiting. Yet, in the course of the play she also reveals complex emotions. The daughter of a moderately famous preacher who left her a sizable amount of money, Honey was apparently pregnant when she married Nick, but the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. Since then she has skillfully concealed from Nick her efforts to prevent a pregnancy. Her use of secret birth control devices reveals a deep-seated fear of having a child—and a fear of growing up. Martha’s beautiful descriptions of her own “son” bring out Honey’s maternal instincts, but whether these desires are fleeting or permanent cannot be determined within the context of the play.

Honey’s name suggests the cloying sweetness that is her exterior—and also the sense that a little of her goes a long way. Some readers feel that “Honey” is not her real name, but merely the affectionate and condescending tag Nick has given her.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: SETTING

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is set in the fictitious New England college town of New Carthage. The name of the town suggests the ancient civilization of Carthage, which for nearly 1,500 years (from the 8th century B.C. to the 7th century A.D.) was the most important settlement west of Egypt on the northern coast of Africa. Carthage was settled by the Phoenicians, a people known for their seafaring and commerce, in the 9th century B.C. Over the next several centuries, Carthage was able to hold its own in battles with Greece, but a series of conflicts with Rome in the third and second centuries B.C., known as the Punic Wars, proved to be the downfall of the Carthaginians. The Romans permanently conquered Carthage in 146 B.C. and, as was their custom, sowed the vanquished’s land with salt, to prevent fertile growth for years to come.

Albee’s decision to name the play’s college town after a vanished civilization (which was known for its artistic achievement as well as its military power) clearly invites parallels to our own contemporary civilization. America may not be destroyed by another country, as Carthage was (although that possibility exists), but it may meet its downfall through internal corruption and spiritual emptiness. That Carthage was made literally sterile by Roman salt also links that ancient city symbolically with New Carthage, a city made figuratively sterile by shoddy morals and hollow values. (New Carthage also is the home of George and Martha, sterile because they can have no children.)

Placing New Carthage in New England ironically links the setting of the play to one of its themes, “American values.” New England was a birthplace of America’s freedom and has long been considered a stronghold of solid American values. By setting a play that analyzes the corruption of some of these values in an area long identified with them, Albee emphasizes the difference between what these values were and what they have become.

Further irony is to be found in Albee’s choice of an academic setting for the play. One would think that a college town would be a place of learning, achievement, and sophisticated culture. Instead, Albee shows us a hotbed of lust, deception, and sadness, with people who are motivated in large part by greed and self-interest.

Confirming the play’s setting to one room (the living room of George and Martha) establishes an enclosed, claustrophobic feeling, as if the characters are trapped with each other. Even when they leave to go to another room, they return to this arena where the battles of the play rage.

When Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was originally produced on Broadway, the set was described by the play’s director, Alan Schneider, as follows: “It seems real… but it’s not real. It has all kinds of angles and planes that you wouldn’t ordinarily have, and strong distortions.” Schneider said, and others have agreed, that the play could be done on an abstract (nonrealistic) set, such as an all-white space. Such a set would heighten the sense that the play is not strictly realistic, but has overtones of the Theater of the Absurd.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: THEMES

Here are some of the major and minor themes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The themes often overlap and support one another in ways that make the play complex and richly textured.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: MAJOR THEMES