Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Study Guide

Edward Albee was raised by wealthy adoptive parents; his adoptive father was the son of a vaudeville magnate and owned several theaters. Edward was expelled from high school, and then dismissed from a military academy in Pennsylvania. He completed his secondary education at the Choate School and then was expelled from Trinity College in Connecticut for skipping classes and refusing to attend chapel. He moved to Greenwich Village and began writing plays. Albee currently teaches playwriting at the University of Houston and has received three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

During the sixties, an image of the happy American family was reinforced by the conservative president, Dwight Eisenhower, as well as popular sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. These social images, of the happy housewife and the perfect marriage, were unrealistic and masked the harsher reality that lay beneath the social exterior. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf resists the narrative pressure to present reality in a digestible form and instead exposes family life in a harsher light. At the same time, the Cold War was an important feature of American political life in the 1960’s, and the non-violent tensions that arise in Martha and George’s living room might be understood as a small-scale representation of the international conflict.

Buried Child, written by Sam Shepard in 1978, like Who’s Afraid, depicts the breakdown of an American family, and expresses disillusionment with the fiction of the American dream. Both George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take it With You (1936) and Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party (1957) also resemble Albee’s play in that they feature party games that get out of hand and result in the playing out and revelation of private marital tensions.