Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a long and controversial play by the American dramatist Edward Albee. It opened on Broadway in 1962 and was Albee’s first full-length play. He had previously written several one-act plays that earned him international recognition.
The drama takes place over several hours of a single evening and early morning in the home of George and Martha, a middle-aged married couple living on a college campus. George is a bitter, burned-out professor, and Martha is his shrewish wife. The couple returns home from a faculty party and entertains a younger couple—a new biology professor named Nick and his childlike wife, Honey.
Partly under the influence of alcohol, the small party turns into a psychologically devastating series of verbal battles. By the end of the 31/2-hour play, illusions have been destroyed and fears and guilty secrets exposed. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gained both praise and criticism for its brutal verbal attacks and savage humor. Some critics were perplexed by the play’s ending, in which George destroys his and Martha’s fantasy that the couple have a son. The action never explains the play’s title, which Albee said he saw scrawled on the mirror of a bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.
On Broadway, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen played George and Martha, and George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon played Nick and Honey. A 1966 motion-picture version starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as George and Martha. Taylor and Sandy Dennis, who played Honey, won Academy Awards for their performances under Mike Nichols’s direction. The film also starred George Segal as Honey’s husband, Nick.
See also Albee, Edward ; Burton, Richard ; Taylor, Elizabeth .
