"What a dump!"... They're discontent.

George and Martha:
sad, sad, sad...

The shocking story behind Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee breaks every convention, allowing us to see the behavior of the perfect American couple at home: George and Martha, showing their true colors to each other and to their particular guests Nick and Honey, who are new in town.

George and Martha can be interpreted as a protest against the postwar stereotypes about the perfect family in the USA. Albee intents to raise awareness of the fact that not all families are composed by a happily married couple with kids. There’s not always a great job involved, and there’s not always love involved, or at least, not the accepted kind of love. This one is twisted, it’s toxic, suffocating, and it characterizes this couple as exaggeratedly cruel individuals; they are mean to each other and to the ones around them. There is also no filter when alcohol is in the picture, and alcohol is present in huge amounts throughout the whole play.

Nick and Honey are shown as the perfect couple in contrast to George and Martha; they are young, educated, and feel completely uncomfortable around their hosts. They cannot understand why they treat each other like that, how destructive George and Martha’s relationship turned out to be, for society makes them believe that these kind of marriages do not exist. And so, to break the ice between these couples, drinking becomes the main and most repeated activity in this indoor party.

Nonetheless, the ironic spin in the play is the fact that Nick and Honey are as twisted as George and Martha. Dirty secrets are exposed as the story goes on – with, of course, the help of uncountable drinks –, such as the reasons why both men married their wives: because of money (and pregnancy in the case of Nick – which Honey intentionally interrupted later). Their wives provided the vast majority of money in the house, something that was completely rare back in the last century.

The most interesting thing about the play is the way in which Albee constructs these fictional characters George and Martha as role players in their fictional lives. With this, the fact that everybody pretends to be someone they’re not is emphasized; people are phonies for they try to fit in the society requirements by playing fake roles, to look “normal”. And the truth is that nobody is. 

George and Martha are so discontent with their lives that they play with fiction to create a false and temporary sense of happiness. The invention of their "little sonny-Jim" is a great example of this: secretly, George and Martha pretend they have a 21-year-old son to fill a gap in their miserable lives. But once Martha mentions the existence of this boy to Honey, things get out of control, and the most monstrous game takes place. It’s not funny anymore but serious and dangerous because they are now exposed; this kid becomes the subject of the talk, and so the show must go on…

Personal thoughts...

Throughout the reading, one may think that Albee tried to create Nick and Honey so we, the audience, would feel related to them. And, indeed, we could say that, somehow, we are Nick and Honey: we are the newcomers at the beginning of the reading, who are completely shocked by the ways in which Martha and George welcome us. And because we were not raised like that, because we follow all the conventions and society rules, we criticize George and Martha’s ways; we feel disgusted by their words and feelings. But as we go further in our reading, we realize that this is not as weird as we thought at the beginning. This kind of people actually exists; in fact, perfect people don’t exist. And, as Nick and Honey begin to show their flaws, we start reflecting about our own flaws, about how twisted we may be, and how we pretend not to be. And, just like I asked myself about how different Nick and Honey were from George and Martha at the end of the play, I wonder now: how different are we from George and Martha? How much do we hide from others? How many roles have we played to fit in? And how many more will we play?... Sad, sad, sad.

The Beat Generation...

Howl by Allan Ginsberg is a poem which, very much like Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?, aims to raise consciousness about how this capitalist postwar society – which he refers to as Moloch – has negatively forced us to distance us from ourselves, to become the individuals the government needs in order to make this “rat race” work. In a more social sense (rather than political), we could relate this to the anger Martha constantly expresses because George couldn’t get to be the one in charge of the History department as they had planned, and the fact that Nick is more likely to achieve the management of the Biology department kills George. Likewise Nick married her pregnant girlfriend Honey because that is what he was supposed to do; it wasn’t because of love but for moral issues and money.

“Moloch the heavy judger of men” leads us to live in fear, endeavoring to fit in; and our free will is as fictitious as George and Martha’s kid. So NO, we are not the twisted ones here...