Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Finale

The Title’s Inspiration
The film’s title is a reference to the nursery rhyme “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and serves as a metaphor for the characters’ fears and insecurities.


What’s Up With the Ending?
The main action of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? centers around the vicious battle of wills between George and Martha. Martha is a ruthless opponent, and George doesn't get the upper-hand until nearly the end of the play. After being brow beaten, humiliated, and cheated on, George defeats Martha with four simple words: "our son is…dead" (3.245). Martha reacts to this news by erupting into a bestial howl and collapsing to the floor.

It would seem pretty normal for Martha to react dramatically to the death of her son if she actually had a son. The thing is that George and Martha's son is purely imaginary. When they found out they couldn't have kids, they solved the problem by just making a kid up. Even though he's imaginary, both George and Martha have deep attachment to the boy. Martha reveals the depth of her feeling when she says that he is, "the one light in all this hopeless…darkness" (3.401). The darkness in question is probably her "sewer of a marriage," which she also describes as "vile" and "crushing" (3.401).

This dream of a son seems to be so precious to both George and Martha because it's one of the few things they share. They created him together in order to escape from their "sick nights, and pathetic, stupid days" (3.401). The boy is the one bit of real intimacy that the unhappy couple shares. When George "kills" the son it's like he dropped a nuclear bomb. Now George and Martha are left with no illusions behind which they can hide. By the end of the play, they must stare, unblinkingly, into the charred battlefield that is their lives.


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A Summary and Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is probably the most famous and widely studied American play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Edward Albee’s play is about the dysfunctional and self-destructive marriage between a history professor and his wife, witnessed over the course of one night (or, technically, one very early morning) following a party.

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But how should we analyse Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Before we come to the question of analysis, here’s a brief recap of the play’s absurdist plot.

Plot summary


The setting for the play is a professor’s house on the campus of a New England university. At two o’clock in the morning, George, a professor of history, and his wife Martha return home after a party. Martha is the daughter of the president of the university where her husband teaches. Their first names suggest George and Martha Washington, the first President and First Lady of the United States.

George is in his late forties and his wife is six years older, in her early fifties. Where he is somewhat cynical and world-weary, she is fiery and vulgar. She has invited a young couple back with them: Nick, a twenty-something biology lecturer at the university, and his wife Honey, a plain-looking woman also in her twenties.

The first act, ‘Fun and Games’, sees Martha trying to seduce Nick while humiliating both her husband and, to an extent, Honey. As she gets more drunk, Honey grows bolder and asks George and Martha when their son will be coming home.

Doubts are raised over whether George is the biological father of the couple’s son, and Martha reveals that her father had discounted George as a potential candidate to succeed him as president of the university because he isn’t good enough. Honey rushes off to the toilet to be sick, as she has drunk too much.

The second act of the play is titled ‘Walpurgisnacht’, after the witches’ feast or sabbath. Nick confides to George that he only married Honey because she had a phantom pregnancy and he felt he had to do the honourable thing. The two men talk at length, before Nick makes a comment about getting Martha in a corner and ‘mounting’ her.


Martha then seeks to provoke maximum embarrassment in her husband by dancing suggestively with Nick and telling Nick and Honey that her father stopped George from publishing a novel he’d written, about a boy who murders his parents – a book which George insists was autobiographical.

George turns increasingly nasty, decreeing that they should play a party game he calls ‘Get the Guests’. He mockingly re-enacts Honey’s phantom pregnancy, using the information Nick confided in him to taunt them and sow conflict. In response, Martha tries to seduce Nick again, taking him off to the kitchen so they can ‘hump’ there. George confides that his and Martha’s son is, in fact, dead.

The third act, ‘The Exorcism’, begins with Martha alone; when Nick enters, she accuses him of being a ‘flop’ just like her husband. George tells them that there is one more game to play: ‘bringing up baby’.

He and Martha pay tribute to their son, on his twenty-first birthday, before George tells his wife that their son has died in a car crash. When she demands to see the telegram announcing this news, he claims he has eaten it. George sings a song, ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, as the curtain falls.

Analysis

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is often analysed as a response to a specific moment in US history: in 1962, when the play premiered, John F. Kennedy was President, and the United States had a confidence in itself as the leading world superpower. At the same time, tensions with the USSR, particularly over Cuba, led to uncertainty over the future.


American life and self-confidence, which had perhaps been at its peak in the 1960s, was beginning to look like a double-edged sword: cosy and comfortable on the outside, but playing host (as it were) to some darker and more worrying secrets and anxieties.

Albee’s play brilliantly dramatises these, reducing them to a domestic setting centred on middle-class America. The names of the two leads, George and Martha, take us back to the founding of the United States and its first President; this further supports the notion that the play should be read as being ‘about’ America, as well as the lives of individual middle-class Americans.

Edward Albee wrote in the New York Times in 1962 that he was ‘deeply offended’ when he learned he was becoming associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. As he argued in an essay, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One’, one could argue that absurdist theatre is actually more realist, and closer to reality, than so-called ‘naturalist’ or traditional theatre, which was reliant on conventions which failed to reflect actual life.

So whereas naturalist theatre offers itself as a ‘slice of life’, absurdist drama tends to use dream-like rituals and allegories; whereas naturalist drama follows the rational and logical chain of cause and effect (one character does something; another character reacts as one would expect), absurdist theatre does not have to subscribe to such a rational linearity of plot.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with its strange party games and rituals and its refusal to develop in terms of plot and character, is therefore an emblematic example of absurdism. The ritualistic element is even apparent in the pagan and religious titles given to the different acts of the play, e.g., ‘Exorcism’.


Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the question of whether George and Martha actually have a son at all. Like Honey’s phantom pregnancy, the sense we’re left with, by the end of the play, is that he never existed at all: he, too, was a phantom, conjured by George and Martha as a focal point for their dysfunctional marriage.

And if we view Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as an absurdist allegory for America at a particular point in its history, the early 1960s, the son that doesn’t exist might be analysed as a symptom of the country’s anxieties over its future.

Just as the couple have no children yet their imaginary son is the heart and soul of their conflicted relationship, so America is looking to its future – the space race which Kennedy had begun the decade by championing – while ignoring the problems and challenges closer to home.

Edward Albee’s original title for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was ‘Exorcism’, which he ended up using as the title for the final act of the play. The eventual title came from a bar which Albee frequented, where patrons would leave graffiti, written in soap, on a large mirror. Albee saw someone had riffed on ‘who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’ (from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’) and daubed ‘who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, a reference to the modernist writer, and Albee made a mental note of the phrase, thinking it would make a good title for a play.


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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the 1966 film adaptation, see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film). For the Jimmy Smith album, see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (album).
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1962 Broadway poster
Written by Edward Albee
Characters
Martha
George
Nick
Honey
Date premiered October 13, 1962
Place premiered Broadway – Billy Rose Theatre
Original language English
Subject Marital strife
Genre Drama
Setting Martha and George's New England home
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee first staged in October 1962. It examines the complexities of the marriage of middle-aged couple Martha and George. Late one evening, after a university faculty party, they receive unwitting younger couple Nick and Honey as guests, and draw them into their bitter and frustrated relationship.

The three-act play normally takes just under three hours to perform, with two 10 minute intermissions. The title is a pun on the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933), substituting the name of the celebrated English author Virginia Woolf. Martha and George repeatedly sing this version of the song throughout the play.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962–1963 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It is frequently revived on the modern stage. The film adaptation was released in 1966, written by Ernest Lehman, directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis.

Plot summary
Act One: "Fun and Games"
George is an associate professor of history, and his wife Martha is the daughter of the president of the college where George teaches. After they return home from a faculty party, Martha reveals she has invited a young married couple she met at the party over for a drink. (Also cut in the definitive edition: Just before the couple—Nick and Honey—arrive, George gives a vague warning about "the bit with the kid" that Martha appears to understand.)

As the four drink, Martha and George engage in scathing verbal abuse of each other in front of Nick and Honey. These interactions embarrass the younger couple, but they stay. At one point, Honey lets on that Martha told her about their son, which appears to unnerve George. After this, Martha's taunts and George's passive aggression only increase. When Martha launches into an embarrassing story about how she humiliated him with a sucker punch at a backyard party, George disappears. The story continues, with Nick and Honey laughing, until George appears with a rifle and fires at Martha. To their surprise, a Chinese parasol pops out of the gun barrel. Everyone finds this extremely funny, but Martha quickly resumes her taunting of George, which culminates in Martha relating how her father had thought that George would eventually rise to lead the college, but George's lack of ambition has made him pathetic to Martha, who calls him a "great big fat flop".[1] George reacts violently by breaking a bottle. Honey, who has grown more and more deliriously drunk, quickly runs to the bathroom to vomit, leaving George alone with glass all over the room.

Act Two: "Walpurgisnacht"
(Traditionally, "Walpurgisnacht" is the name of an annual witches' meeting, satiric in the context of the play.)
Nick returns to find George alone. As they talk about their wives, Nick reveals that Honey once had a "hysterical pregnancy". George tells Nick about a time he went to a gin mill with some boarding school classmates, one of whom had accidentally killed his mother by shooting her. This friend was mocked for ordering "bergin" (bourbon). The following summer, the young friend was driving with his father and suddenly swerved to avoid a porcupine, accidentally killing his father. The boy was then sent to an asylum and became mute. As the story concludes, George and Nick discuss children, but the conversation turns insulting before Martha and Honey return.

Honey calls for music, so they put on a record. Because George refuses to dance, Martha dances with Nick, taunting George by making the dance very sensual while she tells another embarrassing story about George: his efforts to publish a novel about a boy who accidentally killed both of his parents (with the insinuation that the deaths were actually murder), but Martha's father would not let it be published. George attacks Martha, but Nick separates them. Clearly not satisfied, George launches into a new "game" called "Get the Guests", in which George begins telling a story about a "mousie" that is a thinly-veiled retelling of everything Nick told George about Honey, including her alcoholism and her "hysterical pregnancy", implying that Honey "trapped" Nick into marrying her by pretending to be pregnant. Honey, devastated, again runs to the bathroom to vomit.

Martha begins to openly seduce Nick in the living room right in front of George, who blithely smiles and pretends to read a book. This greatly annoys Martha, who tells George that if he does nothing to stop her, she'll have sex with Nick. George is unmoved, so Martha goes upstairs with Nick. Immediately, an enraged George throws his book against the house's doorbell chimes, which ring out as he promises to make Martha "regret this."

In some productions until 2006, Honey then returns, wondering who rang the doorbell. George then interrogates Honey about her pregnancy, then openly tells Honey that he is going to inform Martha that their son has died. In a 2006 revision by the author of the script, however, this scene is cut.[2]

Act Three: "The Exorcism"
(Exorcism is the expulsion or attempted expulsion of a supposed evil spirit from a person or place.)
Martha enters an empty living room and shouts for the others to come out of hiding. Nick joins her. The doorbell rings, and George enters carrying snapdragons and making literary jokes that Martha seems to actually enjoy. Martha and George then argue about whether the moon is up, an odd game whose metaphors reveal that Nick was too drunk to have sex with Martha upstairs.

George asks Nick to bring Honey back for the final game, "Bringing Up Baby". Nick and Honey sit helplessly as George, at last, talks openly about his and Martha's son. As he accuses Martha of being overbearing to their son, she protests, leading George to ask for her "recitation". Martha agrees, and begins to recall their son's beauty and talents and accuses George of ruining his life. As she speaks, George recites sections of the Libera me (part of the Requiem Mass, the Latin mass for the dead) and Kyrie eleison (ancient Greek: "Lord, have mercy").

This continues until George informs Martha that the doorbell earlier was a messenger from Western Union arriving with a telegram that George says informed him that their son was dead, having been killed in a car crash when he swerved to avoid a porcupine—the exact wording that George earlier used in a story about a completely different person. Martha demands proof, but George insists on the reality of the situation. Martha, distraught, collapses. It slowly dawns on Nick that the son George and Martha have been talking about is not real. The fictional son is a "game" the two have been playing since discovering early in their marriage that they are infertile. George has decided to "kill" him because Martha broke the game's single rule: not to mention the boy to anyone else.

Overcome with pity, Nick and Honey leave. Martha suggests that they could invent a new imaginary child, but George insists they cannot. The play ends with George singing "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", a joke song someone sang that night at the faculty party. Martha weakly replies, "I am, George. I am."

Themes
Reality and illusion
Albee has said that the title of the play "means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions."[3][4](pp;71–72) Albee's interest in the theme of reality versus illusion is expressed in a number of his plays. In discussing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he cites Nietzsche's interpretation of the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy of ancient Greek drama, as described in The Birth of Tragedy. Albee says,

There was a time when people believed in deities. And then revolutions came – industrial, French, Freudian, Marxist. God and absolutes vanished. Individuals find this very difficult and uncomfortable. All they have left is fantasy or the examination of the self.[5]

According to Lawrence Kingsley, Albee's characters create illusions to help them evade feelings of their own inadequacy – as "George and Martha have evaded the ugliness of their marriage by taking refuge in illusion." The play demonstrates "how his characters must rid themselves of falsehood and return to the world in which they must live."[4](pp;71–74)

The distinction between truth and illusion is at times deliberately unclear. The existence of the child, the "murder" by George of his parents, or Honey's "pregnancy" may be illusions, but they seem real to the characters. Illusions may be exorcised in the play, but no truth or apparent reality is supplied in its place. "All truth", George says, "[becomes] relative".[6]

Critique of societal expectations
Christopher Bigsby asserts that this play opposes the idea of a perfect American family and societal expectations as it "attacks the false optimism and myopic confidence of modern society".[7] Albee takes a heavy-handed approach to displaying this contrast, making examples of every character and their expectations of the people around them. Societal norms of the 1950s consisted of a nuclear family: two parents and two (or more) children. This conception was picturesque in the idea that the father was the breadwinner, the mother a homemaker, and the children well-behaved.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? smashes these conventions and shows realistic families that are far from perfect and possibly ruined. The families of Honey and Martha were dominated by their fathers, with no sign of a mother figure in their lives. George and Martha's chance at a perfect family was ruined by infertility and George's failure to become a prominent figure at the university.

Inspirations
Title
The play's title alludes to the English novelist Virginia Woolf. She died by suicide at age 59 in 1941. She left behind a note in which she expressed love for her husband Leonard Woolf and sorrow for the anguish she was causing him.[8] Twenty years later, playwright Edward Albee corresponded with him, asking permission to use his late wife's name in the title of a new play, according to literary critic Leon Edel, an acquaintance of Leonard Woolf.[9] Woolf granted permission, according to Edel.[9]

Edward Albee's title also pokes fun at the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's animated version of The Three Little Pigs. Because the rights to the Disney song are expensive, most stage versions, and the film, have Martha sing to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush", a melody that fits the meter fairly well and is in the public domain. In the first few moments of the play, it is revealed that someone sang the song earlier in the evening at a party, although who first sang it (Martha or some other anonymous party guest) remains unclear. Martha repeatedly needles George over whether he found it funny.

Albee described the inspiration for the title:

I was in there [at a saloon in New York] having a beer one night, and I saw "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf – who's afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.[10]

The title phrase happened to appear five years before the play's premiere, in a 1957 issue of The New Yorker:

A coffee fiend we know dropped into an espresso joint in Greenwich Village the other day and found himself whiling away his time reading the graffiti on the wall beside his chair. Most of the stuff was pretty humdrum, but he was arrested by a legend, done in elegant calligraphy, that read, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?"[11]

The New Yorker responded in 2013 by suggesting that perhaps the graffito that Albee saw was the same graffito that The New Yorker reported in 1957.[12]

Characters
In an interview, Albee said Martha and George were based on two of his friends, married New York socialites Willard Maas and Marie Menken.[13] Maas was a professor of literature at Wagner College and Menken was an experimental filmmaker and painter. Maas and Menken were known for their infamous salons, where drinking would "commence at 4 PM on Friday and end in the wee hours of night on Monday" (according to Gerard Malanga, an Andy Warhol associate and friend to Maas). The primary conflict between George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? derived from Maas's and Menken's tempestuous and volatile relationship.

Production history
Original production
The print edition of the play was published in 1962 and was one of the early releases of Atheneum Books. It sold over 70,000 copies in hard and soft cover editions.[14]

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theatre on 13 October 1962. The original cast featured Uta Hagen as Martha, Arthur Hill as George, Melinda Dillon as Honey, and George Grizzard as Nick. It was directed by Alan Schneider. Subsequent cast members included Henderson Forsythe, Eileen Fulton, Nancy Kelly, Mercedes McCambridge, and Elaine Stritch.

Because of the play's unusual length (over three hours), the producers also cast a matinee company that performed twice a week, featuring Kate Reid as Martha, Shepperd Strudwick as George, Avra Petrides as Honey, and Bill Berger as Nick.[15] As with the evening company, these matinee performances also sold out.[13]

The play closed on 16 May 1964, after 5 previews and 664 performances.[16] It opened in London in 1965, starring Constance Cummings and Ray McAnally. Virginia Woolf's widower Leonard attended a performance and enjoyed it, according to an acquaintance of his, literary critic Leon Edel.[9]

Original Broadway cast album
In 1963, Columbia Masterworks released a four-LP boxed recording of the original Broadway cast performing the entire play, directed by Alan Schneider.

The release contained a 16 page booklet with photos from the original production, critical essays by Harold Clurman and Walter Kerr, cast and crew biographies, and a short article by Goddard Lieberson on the task of recording the play. The introduction is by Albee, in which he writes, "I cannot conceive of anyone wanting to buy [this] massive album; but ... every playwright wants as much permanence for his work as he can get."

The recording was issued in both stereo (DOS 687) and monaural (DOL 287) formats. It was out of print for many years, was not released in other formats, and is highly prized among collectors, as a play with such adult themes had never been recorded for the general public before. It was finally re-released in 2014 by Masterworks Broadway.[17]

Notable productions
In 1970, Henry Fonda and Richard Burton attempted to recruit Warren Beatty and Jon Voight for an all-male production, but Albee refused permission.[18]

Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara starred in a 1976 Broadway revival.

Mike Nichols and Elaine May starred in a 1980 production in New Haven.

Diana Rigg and David Suchet starred in a 1996 production of the play at the Almeida Theatre in London before transferring to the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End in 1997.

Patrick Stewart and Mercedes Ruehl starred in a 2000–2001 production at The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

In 2001, Howard University cast an all African American cast in a school production. They received permission from Albee to change some of the language to be more fitting to a black family in the 1960s. Albee attended one of the performances and said that he enjoyed it. This version was revived in 2025 by the Portland Stage Company in Maine with the same actor playing George as in the 2001 version.

The play was revived on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre, opening on 12 March 2005, in previews and closing on 4 September 2005, after 8 previews and 177 performances. Directed by Anthony Page, it starred Kathleen Turner as Martha and Bill Irwin as George, with Mireille Enos as Honey and David Harbour as Nick. Irwin won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for his role.[19] The production transferred to London's West End at the Apollo Theatre with the entire original cast, running from 31 January to 13 May 2006.[20] In January 2007, the production played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, for one month. On 6 February 2007, the production began a six-week run at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

Notably, it was this 2005 production that led to the publication of a revised script – one that has been used ever since – although many of its revisions were introduced in earlier productions. Among the revisions was the removal of early references to George and Martha's son, as well as the reference to the fact that George felt that he helped cause his parents' death, which was originally the subject of his failed novel. A roughly 7 page scene with George and Honey at the end of Act II has also been removed completely. These and other changes seem to be there to clarify plot points, but arguably rob the play of some of its ambiguity and tenuous relationship with realism.

The play toured in the US and played in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Theatre from 11 April – 12 May 2007.

On 12 December 2010, the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago began performances of the play featuring Amy Morton as Martha, Tracy Letts (the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of August: Osage County)[21] as George, Carrie Coon, and Madison Dirks. The production was directed by Pam MacKinnon, who previously directed the premieres of Albee's Peter and Jerry and Occupant. This production began previews on Broadway at the Booth Theatre on 27 September 2012, opening on 13 October, 50 years after the original Broadway opening.[22][23] MacKinnon again directed, with the Steppenwolf cast reprising their roles. The production and cast received praise in The New York Times from reviewer Charles Isherwood.[24] Letts won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.[25]

Meg Tilly returned to acting in 2011 to play Martha in a production by Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre.[26][27] The show ran from 5 July – 17 July 2011, in Victoria, British Columbia.

On 21 February 2017, a production directed by James Macdonald began at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London, featuring Imelda Staunton, Conleth Hill, Imogen Poots, and Luke Treadaway.[28][29] It ran until 27 May 2017.

A Broadway revival was scheduled to premiere on 9 April 2020, in a production directed by Joe Mantello and produced by Scott Rudin. It was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic after 9 preview performances, without officially opening.[30] It starred Laurie Metcalf, Rupert Everett, Russell Tovey, and Patsy Ferran.[31] Eddie Izzard had been set to play George, but it was announced on 11 September 2019, that Everett would replace her.[32]

Curve (theatre) is set to stage a revival in Autumn 2025 staring Cathy Tyson.[33]

Dance interpretation
In 1995 and 1996, the Canadian One Yellow Rabbit troupe mounted a homage in dance to Albee, Permission, in the form of an hour-long ballet inspired by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was performed in Calgary, Toronto, Phoenix, Guadalajara, and Mexico City.[34]

Sequels and parodies
In 2018 the Elevator Repair Service premiered a sequel written by Kate Scelsa, titled Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf. This play introduces new plot elements such as vampirism.[35]

Multiple television shows have episodes parodying the original play. Season 3, Episode 1 of American Dad! features a sub-plot in which the characters of Roger and Francine pretend to be a university professor and his wife. After inviting over a young couple, the two behave much like the characters of George and Martha. The episode concludes with Roger "killing" their imaginary child much like George does in the play.[36]

The critically acclaimed "Dinner Party" episode of The Office (Season 4, Episode 13) was originally titled "Virginia Woolf" by writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. This episode is a parody in which Michael invites new couple Jim and Pam to a dinner party that slowly devolves into a chaotic exhibition of Michael's tense relationship with his girlfriend and former boss, Jan.[37]

Season 2, Episode 4 of Our Flag Means Death is a parody in which the dysfunctional relationship of Anne Bonny and Mary Read is meant to parallel that of George and Martha, and whose antics instigate a reconciliation of Ed and Stede.[38]

Steven Soderbergh’s 2025 film Black Bag, written by David Koepp, is a spy-thriller with an intentional parallel to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Married couple George and Kathryn, both spies in British intelligence, host a pair of couples, also co-workers and spies, for a dinner party. George investigates all five people during dinner, including his wife, as the source of an intelligence breach.[39]

Awards
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962–1963 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Its stars won the 1963 Tony Awards for Best Actor and Actress. It was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama by that award's drama jury, but the award's advisory board – the trustees of Columbia University – objected to its profanity and sexual themes, and overruled the jury, awarding no Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1963.[40]

The 2005 revivial won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for Bill Irwin's role.

The 2012 revival won the 2013 Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Letts), and Best Direction of a Play (MacKinnon).

Film
Main article: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film)
A film adaptation of the play was released in 1966. It was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, Richard Burton as George, George Segal as Nick, and Sandy Dennis as Honey. All four actors were nominated for Academy Awards: Taylor and Burton for Best Actress and Actor and Dennis and Segal for Supporting Oscars. Taylor won the Oscar for Best Actress but Burton was passed over that year in favor of Paul Scofield in A Man For All Seasons. Dennis won Best Actress in a Supporting Role, while Segal lost to Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie.

Jack Valenti identified the film as the first controversial film he had to deal with as president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). It was the first to use the slang "screw" and the phrase "hump the hostess". As he said,

In company with the MPAA's general counsel, Louis Nizer, I met with Jack Warner, the legendary chieftain of Warner, and his top aide, Ben Kalmenson. We talked for three hours, and the result was deletion of 'screw' and retention of 'hump the hostess', but I was uneasy over the meeting.[41]

Original film soundtrack album

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
The film was given a "Deluxe Edition Two-Record Set" soundtrack album release in 1967 by Warner Bros. Records, and was the first film to have its vocals be released in their entirety on an album, as the film at that time could not be shown on network television.[clarification needed] It contains the vocals of the four actors performing in the film. The only music on the album is a song, "Virginia Woolf Rock", that plays while Martha and Nick are dancing (but plays a little differently than it does in the film).

In at least two instances alternative takes were used: Taylor's memorable "Goddamn you!" line is restored to "Screw you!", and some of the dialogue from the dancing sequence was lifted from another take. As Martha tells Nick and Honey her story about punching George in the stomach in front of her father, it is heard very clearly while in the film it becomes muffled as the camera follows George into another room to get a gun. The album also runs half an hour shorter than the film, since most pauses and long silences were removed, but virtually every line remains intact. The album's cover has the four main actors and the back cover has some background information about them, the five-month shooting schedule, and Albee, and a brief synopsis of the film.

References
 Albee, Edward (1962). Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Atheneum Books. pp. 57–59.
 Lowry, Mark (September 30, 2011). "Drink, drink and be merry". University of North Texas Department of Dance and Theatre. Theater Jones (review). Retrieved October 15, 2012.
 Flanagan, William (1966). "Edward Albee: The art of the theatre". The Paris Review. Vol. 39. p. 33.
 Kingsley, Lawrence (March 1973). "Reality and illusion: Continuity of a theme in Albee". Educational Theatre Journal. 25 (1): 71–74. doi:10.2307/3205837. JSTOR 3205837.
 Morgan, T.B. (May 26, 1967). "Angry playwright in soft spell". Life.
 Meyer, Ruth (March 1968). "Language: Truth and illusion in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?". Educational Theatre Journal. 20 (1): 69. doi:10.2307/3204876. JSTOR 3204876. 20th-century American theatre issue
 Bigsby, C.W. (October 1967). "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee's morality play". Journal of American Studies. 1 (2): 268. doi:10.1017/S002187580000788X.
 Jones, Josh (August 26, 2013). "Virginia Woolf's Handwritten Suicide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)". Open Culture. Archived from the original on February 24, 2018. Retrieved February 18, 2018.
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Further reading
Gefter, Philip (2024). Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781635579628. OCLC 1420225016. On the play, the 1966 film adaptation, and their impact.
External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
;Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; (list of productions) at the Internet Broadway Database
;Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; (1962 production) at the Internet Broadway Database
Billington, Michael (February 1, 2006). "Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Apollo Theater, London". The Guardian. London. Retrieved May 16, 2023.