Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf Essay

The play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was expertly written by Edward Albee in 1962. It is one of the most well regarded plays around today. Yet it doesn’t captivate me the way I expected. I have to say, I liked the acting of Martha and George in the LAVC Play Production. They did a really great job.

Matt McLaughlin was convincing as a man who has no choice but to say yes to anything his wife asks him to do. He executed the role of George really well and was one of the characters that I enjoyed watching on stage. I liked the anger, the insanity, and the sadness. The anger of being married to a vicious woman like Martha and the sadness that comes with humiliation and hope that one day she would learn to respect him and the insanity that claims George’s character. I think that when George told Nick a story about a boy who accidentally shot his Mother and caused his Father’s death, it was based

on his life. That might be one of the reasons why George was having a hard time finding success, because he thinks he need to suffer for what he did and maybe that’s also the reason why he just let Martha humiliate him.

I also loved Kiki Bennett’s portrayal of Martha, I think her physical features suits the Martha character that I had pictured. I could really feel the cruelty and viciousness in her. I think she was one of the most cruel leading character that I’ve ever seen in a play. She could also be an example of a woman whose trying to hide her vulnerability through cruelness and alcohol. Back in those days women depended upon their husbands’ success. They could find fulfillment when their husband succeed. Martha was disappointed when George couldn’t possibly give that to her. She was bitter because she could have gotten that success for herself, because she knew she was smart. It was an ill-fated reality for her to be trapped in a marriage to a man like George who keeps disappointing her. But she knows how George loves her, she could feel it, because George could tolerate whatever cruelness and craziness she showed, that no other man could tolerate. She might have been hating herself and convince that she doesn’t deserve to be loved. She loved and hated George at the same time.

I liked the idea that there is only one setting that they used in the play. The decision to stay in one room adds to the craziness of the play by making it claustrophobic. It makes you (the audience) feel like you are trapped in one place. I loved how Martha changes her costume from time to time, it passes the message that she had never found contentment in her life and wanted to change something. I really can’t relate to the lights that were used during the production, it was unclear to me the point that the different colors were trying to get across.

At the beginning of Act 3, Martha humiliates Nick because she was disappointed that he was unable to perform sexually.

The significance of the particular type of flowers that George brings in to present to Martha is actually to rebuke her for what she did. It signaled that he was actually tired of what Martha keeps doing to him, that his heart almost died knowing his wife was in their bed with another man and not doing anything about it. That’s what he means when he said “Flores para los muertos” which means “flowers for the dead.” My interpretation of the “big reveal” between George and Martha on Act 3 was that the imaginary child that they were making was actually to fill up the void in their crumbling marriage through this obsession. When George was telling the story about how their son died, it was almost the same story that he told Nick about a boy who accidentally killed his Mother. I think George was trying to connect himself to the child. It might be that it had been their lifelong dream to have a child but their dreams died along with their faith in their

marriage.

I think all in all the idea of the play was to tell us the reality of marriage in our society and how people hide the failures and mistakes on their own marriage through the illusions that they create.