Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

A detailed Summary of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe is far and away one of the most personal plays that I have ever been to. This play seemed to hit on all aspects of life in the 60's, materialism, plastic appearances and an abundance of alcohol to help bring about the true nature of the characters. The most amazing thing about Albee's play was the fact that it seemed to describe human nature to a tee. The differences between 1962 and 2001 are huge, we have basically created new lifestyles for ourselves, but this play proves once again that human nature never becomes outdated. Albee hits on several aspects of the way we project ourselves as couples in social situations, George and Martha probably seemed like a perfectly happy couple on the outside to all the other faculty members who attended the party but once they were in private their image is projected in a whole new light. In a time when divorce was not nearly as prevalent as it is today this was probably a fairly common scene for the middle class of the time. Couples stayed together because that is what society condoned, breakups in marriage were scorned and high position families and couples stayed together for the sake of their careers no matter what kind of difficulties they

Edward Albee hit on so many aspects of human nature that the audience cannot help but to be responsive in one way or another to his words, we all have these problems but hopefully not to the same degree that he has illustrated. This play was immensely powerful and could probably be used for marriage counseling, it has a value that allows us as the audience to sit back and look at a time of inequality for women and the struggles that men had to face in order to be considered good husbands and providers. The value of this play is one that everyone can value and benefit from seeing or reading because understanding the mistakes of the past will help all of us in the future.

Of all the major themes of the undercover lifestyles of a 60's couple one of the most insightful and obvious to the audience was the children's song that kept appearing throughout the entire performance "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe" sung to the tune of "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf". I noticed that right in the beginning of the play Martha began singing this song, at first it was not completely obvious why, it just seemed to be a little bit of comic relief for the group. After a while of this little chanting song I began to notice something else about it, the characters only started to sing this song in moments when they were horribly uncomfortable or wanted to sort of get out of the situation that they were in at the time. The song came up at times of extreme discomfort for any one of the characters and suggested so many different types of underlying themes. One that was particularly evident was the fact that all these people still seemed in one way or another to rely on their parents and since they had no children they sung this slightly more adult version of a popular and well known children's song, this suggested that all these peo

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Approximate Word count = 1237
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Arts