Who’s Afraid of the Awful Truth?

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

E dward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , which opened on Broadway on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, was bound to be a success. Its mixture of the knowing and the naive reflects the attitudes of the liberal youth in the 1960s to all the political, social, and moral conventions from which they had liberated themselves. Now, after fifty years, something less public and more personal within the play has grown—like the tiny organism that sparked it off—into the biggest public issue of our times: the fate of the unborn child.

A middle-aged academic couple returning home after a university party at two o’clock in the morning begins a marital battle played out over the rest of the night. In a variety of vindictive and vituperative engagements, George and Martha exercise an inexhaustible capacity to inflict wounds on each other, fuelled by an equally inexhaustible capacity to consume strong drink.

Also present are Nick and Honey, newcomers to the university, whom Martha has invited over for a nightcap after the party. George and Martha drag this young couple into their personal war, now as allies against each other, now as a common victim; sometimes presenting themselves as a cautionary example, sometimes using the couple to justify their own failures and bitterness.

Above all, they seem to need the couple as both spectators and partners in a series of cruel games that form the substance of their marriage. These games are both the major weapons they employ against each other and the means by which they continue to need, know, and commune with each other—a contorted, desperate parody of how they once vowed to love, honor, and obey.

George seems to take a grim pleasure in referring to their marital animosities by glib, playful names such as Humiliate the Host, Hump the Hostess, and Get the Guests. The last is brought out with a flourish when George tells a kind of children’s bedtime story through which he reveals that Nick married Honey because she entrapped him with a false pregnancy.

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Who’s Afraid of the Awful Truth?