Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Great Plays of the 20th Century

Many readers assume Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is connected to the well-known novelist of the same name, but it isn’t. Albee found the phrase on a mirror in a Greenwich Village bar, written in soap as a drunken pun on “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” years before he ever sat down to write the play. The phrase lodged itself in his memory for the better part of a decade. When he finally needed a title, he grabbed it, calling it a rather typical university-intellectual joke. Virginia Woolf has nothing to do with the marriage that unravels over the next three acts.

Origins and Influences

Edward Albee’s childhood began in an unsettling fashion. Adopted eighteen days after his birth, he was raised in Larchmont, New York, by Reed and Frances Albee, whose family fortune came from a chain of vaudeville theatres. It bought him private schools and horses, not warmth: he was expelled from three of the schools, and his relationship with his adoptive mother stayed, by his own account, cold and combative. Albee moved out as a teenager and headed to Greenwich Village, supporting himself with odd jobs while writing poetry and an unpublished novel, until the playwright Thornton Wilder urged him toward drama instead.

By the time he wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee had already made his name with short one-act dramas — The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, The American Dream — that placed him inside what critics were calling the Theatre of the Absurd, a label he resented even as he shared its conviction that human existence resists easy meaning. The play’s warring couple, though, came from life rather than philosophy: Albee based George and Martha on friends Willard Maas and Marie Menken, a Greenwich Village couple whose marathon weekend parties were every bit as combative and drunken as anything in the finished script.

Three Games Before Dawn

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? unfolds chronologically in real time, from two in the morning until dawn, inside one living room on the campus of a small New England college. George, an unambitious history professor, and Martha, the college president’s daughter, arrive home drunk from a faculty party to find Martha has invited a much younger couple, Biology professor Nick and his mousy wife Honey, over for a nightcap. What was meant to be a quick drink stretches into a three-act siege, each part carrying its own title — Fun and Games, Walpurgisnacht, The Exorcism — and each one escalating the couple’s cruelty toward their guests and each other.

Albee names the individual battles, too: Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, Bringing Up Baby. Calling them ‘games’ gives George and Martha’s cruelty a set of rules, which is its own kind of horror — this is a marriage that has turned long-term resentment into ritual, rehearsed so often that each partner knows exactly where to strike. Nick and Honey arrive as an audience and end up as ammunition, drawn into games they don’t understand until it’s too late to leave.

At the centre of it all sits a fiction: George and Martha’s son, invented years ago and maintained ever since as a private myth neither can quite let go of. Martha breaks an unspoken rule by mentioning him to their guests, and George spends the rest of the night making her pay for it, building to a climax in which he “kills” the boy off in front of everyone. It’s a strange, almost ritualistic image for a play otherwise built from realistic dialogue, and it gives the final act its title: an exorcism, expelling the one illusion their marriage cannot survive without.

Theatrical Style

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? sits deliberately between two theatrical traditions. Its surface remains naturalistic: one-set, one-night, dialogue that sounds like real American speech, in the lineage of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Underneath, though, it shares the absurdist conviction that language itself cannot be trusted, that people build elaborate fictions because the plain truth is unbearable. Albee rejected being filed under the Theatre of the Absurd label critics reached for.

That tension also shows up in the language of the play. Critic Harold Clurman described Albee’s dialogue as a heightened distillation of common American speech rather than a transcript of it, and productions tend to follow that lead: a realistic professor’s living room, book-lined and unglamorous, but lit and paced to let the verbal warfare carry the scene. There’s little physical action across three hours — the drama happens almost entirely in what the characters say to and about each other, which puts enormous weight on rhythm, timing, and an actor’s control of subtext.

The Premiere and Its Reception

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theatre on 13 October 1962, directed by Alan Schneider, with Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill as Martha and George alongside George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon. At just over three hours, it was unusually long for Broadway. Still, audiences didn’t seem to mind: the production ran 664 performances into 1964, with a separate matinee cast added to meet demand. Howard Taubman’s review in The New York Times called the play “wry and electric,” and it swept the 1963 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Actor, and Best Actress.

The one prize it didn’t win says more about 1963 than about the play itself. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama’s jury, John Gassner and John Mason Brown, recommended Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for that year’s award. However, the advisory board — Columbia University’s trustees — overruled them. Citing the prize’s old requirement that awarded plays present “the educational value and power of the stage” and a wholesome view of American life, the board objected to the profanity and sexual frankness of Albee’s play and voted, narrowly, to give no Pulitzer Prize for Drama at all in 1963. Both jurors resigned in protest, condemning the final decision.

The backlash outlasted the decision itself: criticism of the board’s reasoning helped push the Pulitzer Prize to drop its “wholesome” requirement altogether the following year, and Albee’s own vindication came soon enough — he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama outright in 1967, for A Delicate Balance.

Unfading Legacy

The film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? only extended the play’s notoriety. Mike Nichols made his directorial debut with the 1966 adaptation, scripted by Ernest Lehman and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Martha and George, with George Segal and Sandy Dennis as Nick and Honey. It became one of only a handful of films ever nominated in every eligible Academy Award category, and the first to see its entire credited cast nominated for acting Oscars. It won five, including a second Best Actress award for Taylor and Best Supporting Actress for Dennis, and did as much as the stage production to fix George and Martha in the popular imagination.

Stage revivals have kept pace with the film’s fame. Diana Rigg and David Suchet led a landmark 1997 London production at the Aldwych; Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin brought the play back to Broadway in 2005 before transferring to the West End the following year. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre sent its 2010 production — Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha — to Broadway in 2012 for the play’s 50th anniversary, where the Hollywood Reporter said it was “flawlessly cast” while the production went on to sweep the 2013 Tony Awards for Best Revival, Best Actor, and Best Direction.

London saw the play again in 2017, when Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill took on George and Martha at the Harold Pinter Theatre to widespread acclaim. Across six decades and both sides of the Atlantic, Martha has become a defining test for leading actresses—a part sought out precisely because it demands everything: rage, cruelty, grief, and a final collapse into something close to tenderness, often within the same scene.

That pull hasn’t faded. This autumn, Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup take on Martha and George in a new West End production directed by Marianne Elliott, staged in the round at Soho Place from September to December 2026 — the closest London audiences have come yet to sitting inside George and Martha’s living room.

In the Drama Classroom

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a demanding but rewarding text for a drama classroom. Its verbal sparring, sustained across three unbroken acts, asks actors to hold rhythm, subtext, and vocal stamina over long stretches with almost no physical action to fall back on — closer to a boxing match than a conversation. The named “games” George and Martha play — Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests — give students a ready-made structure for devising and improvisation exercises built around status, provocation, and escalation, while Nick and Honey’s reactive, absorbing presence delivers a prime example of ensemble listening rather than performing.

Set alongside the claustrophobic close-ups of the 1966 film, or the in-the-round intimacy of this year’s West End revival, the play also makes a strong comparative exercise in how proximity to an audience changes a scene’s danger — whether the games feel more unbearable watched up close or from a safe theatrical distance.

Below is a free teacher resource containing ten activities for the Drama or Theatre classroom.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Teacher Resource PDF

Edward Albee Interview – Front and Centre

I have always been inspired by Edward Albee and his work, ever since my American-born English Literature teacher introduced me to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in senior high school back in the mid-1980s. I still have my copy of the play from that class, complete with scribbled pencil notes throughout. What an extraordinary play, I thought to myself. And a more mature respect for playwriting and the theatre was born.

Way back in October 2010, on a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon in Melbourne, I sat front and centre in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Sumner Theatre with 500 others to listen to Edward Albee be interviewed for 90 minutes about his life and work in theatre. To this day, I recall sitting in the middle of the front row, a mere two meters from the playwright. I was a 33-year-old man bedazzled like a teenager at a pop concert. Albee was theatre royalty.

He confirmed to us that the title Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was indeed acquired years earlier, when he saw the soap-written phrase on a mirror at a Greenwich Village bar he attended one night, aged 17. He told the audience that the play’s working title was actually The Exorcism, which later became the title of Act 3, instead. Albee was then challenged on the actual title, as the marketing people on Broadway told him that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was too long and wouldn’t fit comfortably on billboards around Manhattan. Albee bluntly replied he wasn’t changing the play title, so they’d better go out and quickly buy some bigger billboards!

The playwright admitted that for decades he was annoyed that he did not get the rightful credit for his screenplay of the 1966 film adapatation, going instead to the film’s producer who Albee joked added about two lines of his own to the film for the characters to exit to and then return from the theme park in the middle of the night, the only part of the film that veered from Albee’s orginal stage play.

So, I took a punt and purchased a new copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at a bookstore the day before. A quiet, 82-year-old Edward Albee did not seem too fussed when I jumped out of nowhere in the foyer afterward, as he was being ushered away to a closed cafe next door. Happily, he gently stopped to sign my copy of his play on the opening page, something I will cherish forever. To this day, I still can’t believe that, for a brief moment in time, I was face to face with one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century.

Edward Albee passed away on 16 September 2016, aged 88.

Other Articles in The Series – Great Plays of the 20th Century

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night