Edward Albee

Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? brings together two couples in a college town, one couple older and more experienced, the other younger and new to the academic world, for a night of psychodrama approaching outright psychological torture. The older couple has clearly performed this ritual many times before, and over the course of the night, while they pass through a series of stages leading form one interpersonal position to another, they cannot be said to be changed by the experience. After all, as noted, they have tortured one another like this before and will do so again. On this night, Martha may give away more secrets or take the drama in a different direction, but still the couple has done this before. The younger couple, on the other hand, experience something new which challenges their view of the accepted order and tests their view of one another. In some ways, they may represented George and Martha at an earlier stage, and the older couple may be a preview of what the younger couple will become.

From the first, it is made clear that this drama belongs to George and Martha and that Nick and Honey are observers and unwitting participants. George and Martha hold the stage for the first part of the play and begin their own interpersonal drama before their audience shows up, their audience being Nick and Honey. Nick and Honey are at a disadvantage in the evening that ensues because they are young, they are guests, and they do not know the "

Related Essays

Edward Albee Edward Albee was considered the chief playwright of the Theater of the Absurd when his first successful one-act experimental plays emerged. .... (1605 6 )

Albee, Edward Edward Albee's Three Tall Women is a remarkable play about an unlikable woman near the end of her long life. .... Review of Three Tall Women by Edward Albee. .... (3269 13 )

The film of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? The film of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? .... Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: Atheneum, 1984. .... (2308 9 )

Edward Albee's play The Zoo Story Edward Albee's play The Zoo Story is a play about communication, or rather, the lack of communication between people who believe they are communicating. .... (1386 6 )

Edward Albee's play The Zoo Story Edward Albee's play The Zoo Story is a play about communication, or rather, the lack of communication between people who believe they are communicating. .... (1399 6 )

to the reason for their fighting, and the two couples interact in a way evocative of psychodrama. The older couple is in control of aspects of this psychodrama, though they do not shape their own responses as well as they do those of the younger couple they are using as pawns in the battle taking place between the two of them, between George and Martha. The use of Virginia Woolf as part of a rewritten children's rhyme relates to the fact that the husband is an intellectual professor, but there is also meaning in the type of work for which Virginia Woolf was known. Virginia Woolf is noted for her novels, which featured a new type of literary style based on psychology and deemed "stream-of-consciousness," but she is also known for her criticism and essays on literary subjects. The act writing was an important human action for her, and she explored the meaning of this communicative process especially in terms of gender, in terms of the expression of women writers and the problems they encountered in finding their fictional voice. Woolf commented on the oppression and repression of women writers in her time and in so doing says much about the relations between men and women in society and specifically about the need for women to

Category: Arts - E