In a way, it’s surprising that Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is still so performed, because there are many things in the play that make it very 1960s-like.

   

The play was a conscious response to the American nuclear family idyll of the 1950s. It desecrates the sanctity of marriage: the wife
goes to be by another man in front of the husband’s eyes.

   

In the face of adversity, the spouses do not help each other, but mockingly push the other to speed up the downhill.

   

Behind the relationship

is a calculation: Martha has wanted a man who would inherit her father’s position as the principal of the college. The younger couple is
married because of pregnancy.

   

Albee wanted to show the flip side of the American dream: those who can’t succeed by “creating themselves” are fooling around
by lying to oneself and others.

   

Albee gave the older couple the same first names as the first presidential couple of the United States, the Washingtons, to illustrate the current plight of the noble nation.

   

The Symbolism of the Play

is trending in the 1960s. The setting is ominously called New Carthage (not New Gomorrah, at least).

   

The invented child is a symbol of the couple’s infertility. When Nick goes to marry George’s wife, Martha, George reads about all possible
from Spengler’s books The Destruction of the West!

   

George speaks

“About the surrender of Berlin”, the significance of which is hardly recognizable by the contemporary viewer’s work. The city does not have the same symbolic value today
than during the Cold War.

   

The Nick in the play has even been interpreted as Nikita HrushChev.

   

The play is built on clear pairs of opposites: hate-love, young-old, intelligent-simple, private-public, past-future,
biology-technology, subjugation-submission, revenge-restitution, life-death, dirty-clean, development-regression, lie-true.

   

But, but:

Perhaps this type of thematic loading is the reason why the play is a classic.

   

Many modern playwrights know how to write scenes, but few seem to have the frenzy to say.

   

Albee has. Or it was.

   

Edward Albee is not

never reached Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? level. No, although he received his three Pulitzers with his later plays.

   

Columbia University, which organizes the Pulitzer, reversed the jury’s decision to award the 1963 prize to Albee –
most obviously because of the play’s coarse language and the moral decadence depicted.

   

Albee has said that he could have written “Virginia Woolf’s son” for as long as he wanted, but he didn’t want to
continues with the heating of the old one.

   

He took his dramas in a more symbolic direction and also continued to depict marriage, but the plays did not have the edge they used to be.

   

By the 1980s and 90s, Albee was performed more by European theaters and American universities than by the United States.
professional theatres.

   

At the time of its birth

Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? startled me with his straightforwardness. The play continued the tradition of American family drama (O’Neill, Miller, Williams), but it did so using European absurdism.

   

The older couple in the play have created their own world for themselves, where it is difficult to say what is true and what is false – such as
for example, in Eugene Ionesco’s chairs.

   

Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? could just as well have been called A Long Day’s Journey into the Night O’Neill’s Six Years
in the manner of the family description presented earlier.

   

Even more in the background of Albee’s play are August Strindberg’s relationship hells Father and Dance of Death. George and Martha often say that they fight until one of them dies. Direct reference is made to
also to the Chariot of Seduction.

   

One of the play’s

The trait is usually not revealed to the viewer. Albee has named the play’s three acts enlighteningly. Act I is called Games
and games, Act II Walpurgis Night and Act III Manaus.

   

From games of truth, we progress to chaotic and drunken arguments. The third act is a purification rite by which Martha and George’s
An imaginary child is buried. By the way, The Buried Child is the name of Sam Shepard’s play.

   

Since Edward Albee, the Western play has startled people by breaking all kinds of taboos. Family plays have seen
gruesome crimes – pedophilia, incest, cannibalism.

   

Albee’s play does not constantly get new performances in Finland just because it is bold in spreading the story of one couple
dirty laundry for others to see.

   

One of the main reasons it works is that even though Martha and George in the play are waging a war on all fronts against each other,
They also love each other. In their own way.