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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

September 2nd, 2009 by Ian

I recently saw Soulpepper’s production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I really like this play, and there’s something that keeps drawing me back to it since first seeing it 15 years ago.

The play is arguably Albee’s masterpiece – controversial when it was first performed in 1962 for it’s coarse language and frank discussions of sexuality – it has remained both an important and influential work for the theatre. And it’s still shocking almost 50 years later.

But seeing it again I was struck by something I’d never noticed before.

Set in a living room on a Northeastern college campus after a Saturday night faculty soiree, the play walks through the dark hours of after-party drinks with George and Martha, and their guests Nick and Honey.

The two couples are polar opposites. George and Martha are middle-aged, George, a mediocre professor, and a disappointment to both his wife and her father, who happens to be the president of the college. Honey and Nick on the other hand are young, Nick is the brilliant, virile, biology professor whose sights are set on the upper echelons of academia.

Through the course of the evening we watch, along with Nick and Honey, the dissolving of a marriage, a liquor-soaked war of words, an evening of “fun and games” where the hosts play “get the guests,” where they ultimately attempt to one-up each other in a battle for power and control. The guests become George and Martha’s pawns and the evening spirals into chaos.

As the characters drown the evening in alcohol, illusion and reality blur. We learn about George and Martha’s son—the other pawn in their battle, and a shadow that hangs over the entire play.

It’s only in the play’s final moments that we learn their son, in fact, doesn’t exist. They’ve never been able to conceive. Instead they have carefully conceived of and constructed the idea of a ‘son.’ The play’s climax comes when George ‘exorcises’ their son (the third act is titled “The Exorcism”) by ‘killing’ him, at which point the evening dissolves, and the illusions fade. The play ends with Martha and George, two powerhouses of language, alone on stage, barely able to speak, wondering if they’ll be able to go on without ‘him.’

I said that seeing the play struck a different chord in me this time. This was the first time that I understood what this ‘son’ had become to George and Martha. They had fashioned him into an idol. The couple had set him up as one that would satisfy their gaping need to be loved, and when that failed to satisfy them, one that could be used as a weapon against the other in their need for self-justification and power. It’s interesting that when George ‘kills’ their son, when he can no longer be used to satisfy their deepest needs, their language stops. In the last moments of the play they are reduced to a simple exchange of ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ They are left with a gaping hole in their lives. And in one of the few moments of tenderness between the couple, they admit that they are afraid.

I’m struck by the blaring honesty of this scene, by the clear depiction of what happens when we set up idols in our lives—that anything we worship as a functional god besides the one true God will destroy us, and will enable our destructiveness.

Seeing the play from this perspective, I couldn’t help thinking how intensely hopeful the ending is. They are rid of the idol that had rooted itself in their hearts for twenty years and they are at a crossroads, with an opportunity to rightly fill the hole that’s left.

The ending is hopeful only because there is an answer to their hopelessness. There is one who can satisfy them completely. And worshipping him won’t destroy them, but will enliven them.

As with all great art, the play challenges us to confront the reality of our brokenness and to ask if there is an answer and an end to it. As the sun rises the next morning on George and Martha’s house in the small college town and the play ends, I’m thankful that in the Gospel we have that answer.