Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee
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Book Summary Information
Author: Edward AlbeeEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1983-03
ISBN: 0451158717
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Signet
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780451158710
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Book Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf
Summary: 5 Stars
This play takes place in the living room of George and Martha a(middle-aged couple)in a house on the campus of a small New England college. The play begins with George and Martha coming home from a falculty party drunk. They invite Nick and Honey over and the marriages begin to fall apart with all the arguing and confusion. Edward Albee gives a clear cut, honest picture of reality of marriage and the fears that go hand in hand with love and intimacy.Albee transforms social problems for which no solution is offered into sexual and family strife,problems for which he has a readily available solution.Albee takes questions of power,work, failure and success and privates them giving them status and value exclusively as family issues.Albee's style is beyond clever-often disturbingly immoral.The play is full of human emotions-distress,humiiiation, love and hate.The play emphasizes the men's social function at the play's end.The women's social function is to engage in reproduction and/or non- productive work.Both Honey and Martha had distorted these terms,by engaging in non-productive reproduction-that is not having children or by having a false child. The women are supposed to help husbands be successes and to remain tempting and non threatening subordinate partners in marriage.albee's women conform the stereotypical notions of women's place:that women take care of home and children while the men take care of the rest of the world. the women are seen as a sexobject, wife, cook, volunteer, semi-professional,hostess.The women are verbally abusive to the men precisely because the men do not suceed in the same stereo typical terms as do e women.The women fail to conform the sex role stereotypes only in their refusal to besilent about the already on-going failures of their men. However at the end of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf the humiliated,weak, unsuccesful man is shown to be stronger than the brutal, emasculating woman.The family problems are solved, not by investigating their ultimate source,which lies outside the home,but by regulating family relations in a highly normaive manner. George gains control over Martha by ridding the central family of all intruders and rivals to his power.In the end of the play the male child is killed because he is too tempting to his mother and imaginatively tempting in Virginia Woolf and sexually tempting in the American Dream.In conclusion George replaces the Daddy above him, subordinates the wife-child,and succesfully fights a reguard action against his own replacement by the son. This reversal is constructed by Albee's taking questions of power,work,failure or successand privatizing them, making social issues appear exclusively as family issuesand solving them as if they were family issues. Because of this the woman functions as a scapegoat. I thought that this play was great. This play captures the reader's attention and keeps it occupied guessing what will happen next until the end of the play.I would advise every one with a good sense of humor to read this play if it is possible.
Summary of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
?Twelve times a week,? answered Uta Hagen, when asked how often she?d like to play Martha in Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like her, audiences and critics alike could not get enough of Edward Albee?s masterful play. A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening?s end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play?s razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ?a brilliantly original work of art?an excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come.?
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