Edward Albee wrote the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Edward Albee (1928-2016) was an American playwright whose other well-known plays include The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), and Tiny Alice (1964). Edward Albee received three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, more than any other living American dramatist at the time of his death.
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf focuses on a married couple, their daughter and her husband, who spend an evening together after they discover that their spouses have been unfaithful to them. The play explores issues of infidelity, sexual frustration, cultural differences between generations, midlife crises ultimately it is about how we choose to deal with the truth. Edward Albee was inspired by a night that occurred at Woolf’s house between her husband and herself and their dentist. Edward Albee took aspects from each character and created his play using these real life events as inspiration.
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a play that was first performed in 1962. It focuses on the tumultuous relationship between George and Martha, an older couple who reside with their child at Edward Albee’s alma mater; The University of Wisconsin-Madison (Woolfe). Edward Albee got his Bachelor’s Degree from the University in 1950 and then shortly after that he got his Master’s Degree. Edward Albee also founded a theatre company in New York with William Flanagan, called The Playwrights Unit in 1959.
Edward Albee is a playwright who has been nominated for many Tony Awards and won three of them. Edward Albee is also the only American playwright to win the Edward Albee’s three times. Edward Albee was considered for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama, but he did not receive one. Edward Albee is very well known for his controversial material that discusses many “taboo” topics, including homosexuality and alcoholism.
It is the ‘good life’ lived to the fullest, or as close to that as possible. Although this sounds like a wonderful, albeit very ambitious goal, Edward Albee thinks it quite impossible for most people to achieve. Edward Albee was born in 1928. He began writing plays in college and achieved early success with The Zoo Story (1958) and The Death of Bessie Smith (1959). Albee’s first major play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theatre on October 13th 1962.
It won both the Donaldson Award and the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Alfred Preisser directed a film version released in 1966 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Burton. While Edward Albee’s plays are serious, they are not dry; Edward Albee injects his plays with comedy and satire. The play is set in the home of George and Martha Washington, an English professor and his wife who host a young couple (Nick and Honey) for drinks after the Washingtons’ polite, older neighbors depart for the night.
The younger couple’s visit is intended to last one evening but becomes an unending cycle of alcohol-fueled fights, games, name-calling (mostly aimed by Martha at Honey), psychological warfare, emotional manipulation and all manner of verbal abuse that George inflicts on Nick as well as on Martha. In a climactic scene near dawn, Martha reveals she has invited a local college professor and his wife to come over in the morning for breakfast when they will hear the couple’s screams when George and Martha “hurt” them. The play is in three acts.
The first act takes place on a Friday night during an especially hot and sticky summer in New Carthage, New York. The setting is the living room of the home that George and Martha Washington share with Nell and Nick, their respective servants. As this scene opens we find George and Martha having drinks before dinner while engaging in shallow conversation (notably about Edward Albee himself) designed to show how witty they are, all the while revealing their cynicism about almost everything except their own vicious gamesmanship – two people trapped by their pasts, stagnant lives and terrible marriages.
As the play unfolds, both characters reveal the dysfunction in their lives and especially in their respective relationships with each other. The second act takes place later that same night after all four have returned from a faculty party. While it is obvious that Honey has been drinking before she arrives back at the house, it is also clear that George and Martha’s guests are not sober.
This becomes important as Edward Albee develops the scene because alcohol will be a factor throughout this act and for most of Act Three during which time Edward Albee makes constant references to drinks both alcoholic and non-alcoholic – wine, whiskey, champagne – always linking them to Edward Albee’s apparent concerns about societal vices such as drinking and smoking. In this act Edward Albee introduces a new character by the name of Nick, a young college professor who is married to Honey.
Edward Albee takes us through their life together and shows why they are at the Washingtons’ home that evening on that hot summer night (revealed in Act One) and how they ended up there. Edward Albee does this while revealing more of his main characters; George and Martha Washington – who we learn about both from what Edward Albee tells us directly and from what others say or do within Edward Albee’s play. The third and final act of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? egins early the next morning after all four guests have slept off most of their intoxication.
The setting has changed radically to the Washingtons’ living room where Edward Albee brings back all four characters who are now sober. Edward Albee uses this act to reveal their true feelings about what has taken place during the course of Edward Albee’s play, how Edward Albee’s characters have changed because of Edward Albee’s play and whether or not Edward Albee’s characters are willing to start anew or continue into Edward Albee’s future as they are.
The world premiere production opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theatre on October 13th 1962. The play was directed by Alan Schneider with scenic design by Robert Randolph, costume design by Beni Montresor, lighting design by Lee Watson and music/dance choreography by Anna Sokolow.
Edward Albee won the 1962-1963 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as Best American Play, and was nominated for two 1963 Tony Awards: Best Actor in a Play (Arthur Hill) and Best Scenic Design (Robert Randolph). Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? ran on Broadway for 562 performances and it has been revived three times: in 1967 with Sandy Dennis and Colleen Dewhurst; again in 1985 with Kathleen Turner and George Grizzard; and most recently with Amy Morton and Tracy Letts starring as Martha.