Introduction

wentieth-century theatre describes a period of great change within the theatrical culture of
the 20th century. There was a widespread challenge to long established rules surrounding
theatrical representation; resulting in the development of many new forms of theatre,
including modernism, Expressionism, Impressionism. political theatre and other forms
of Experimental theatre, as well as the continuing development of already established
theatrical forms like naturalism and realism.

Performances were meant to confront the audience's perceptions and assumptions in order
to raise questions about their society. These challenging and influential plays characterized
much of the final two decades of the 20th-century.

Although largely developing in Europe and North America through the beginning of the
century, the next 50 years saw an embrace of non-Western theatrical forms. Influenced by
the dismantling of empires and the continuing development of post-colonial theory, many
new artists utilized elements of their own cultures and societies to create a diversified
theatre.

So,for the most oh 20th century theatre,realism has been the mainstream.Realism originally
bejan as an experiment to make theatre most useful and realism become the dominant form
of theatre in the 20th century.There have been some experiments,though,ehich have allowed
for more adventurous innovation in mainstream theatre. Starting around 1900, there was a
revival of poetic drama in the States, corresponding to a similar revival in Europe
(e.g. Yeats, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann). The most notable example of this trend was the
"Biblical trilogy" ofWilliam Vaughn Moody, which also illustrate the rise of religious-themed
drama during the same years, as seen in the 1899 production of Ben-Hur and two 1901
adaptations ofQuo Vadis. one of the most successful women playwrights in American
drama, Rachel Crothers, whose interest in women's issues can be seen in such plays as He
and She (1911).[4]

During the period between the World Wars, American drama came to maturity, thanks in
large part to the works of Eugene O'Neill and of the Provincetown Players. O'Neill's
experiments with theatrical form and his combination
of Naturalist and Expressionist techniques inspired other playwrights to use greater freedom
in their works, whether expanding the techniques of Realism,

Other distinct movements during this period include folk-drama/regionalism (Paul Green's
Pulitzer-winning In Abraham's Bosom), "pageant" drama (Green's The Lost Colony, about
the mysterious Roanoke Colony), and even a return to poetic drama (Maxwell
Anderson's Winterset). At the same time, the economic crisis of the Great Depression led to
the growth of protest drama, as seen in the Federal Theatre Project's Living
Newspaper productions
The stature that American drama had achieved between the Wars was cemented during the
post-World War II generation, with the final works of O'Neill and his generation being joined
by such towering figures as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the
maturation of the musical theatre form. Other key dramatists include William Inge, Arthur
Laurents and Paddy Chayefsky in the 50s, the avant garde movement of Jack
Richardson, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber and Edward Albee the 60s, and the maturation of
black drama through Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. In the musical
theatre, important figures include Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Betty
Comden andAdolph Green, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Frank Loesser, Jule Styne, Jerry
Bock, Meredith Willson and Stephen Sondheim.[4]

The period beginning in the mid-1960s, with the passing of Civil Rights legislation and its
repercussions, came the rise of an "agenda" theatre comparable to that of the 1930s. Many
of the major playwrights from the mid-century continued to produce new works, but were
joined by names like Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, Romulus Linney, David Rabe,Lanford
Wilson, David Mamet, and John Guare. Many important dramatists were women,
including Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, Megan Terry, Paula
Vogeland Mara Irene Forns. The growth of ethnic pride movements led to more success by
dramatists from racial minorities, such as black playwrights Douglas Turner Ward, Adrienne
Kennedy, Ed Bullins, Charles Fuller, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange, George C.
Wolfe and August Wilson, who created a dramatic history of United States with his cycle of
plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, one for each decade of the 20th century. Asian American
theatre is represented in the early 70s by Frank Chin and achieved international success
with David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Latino theatre grew from the local activist
performances of Luis Valdez's Chicano-focused Teatro Campesino to his more formal plays,
such as Zoot Suit, and later to the award winning work of Cuban Americans Forns (multiple
Obies) and her student Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer), to Puerto Rican playwrights Jos
Rivera andMiguel Piero, and to the Tony Award winning musical about Dominicans in New
York City, In the Heights. Finally, the rise of the gay rights movement and of the AIDS crisis
led to a number of important gay and lesbian dramatists, including Christopher Durang, Holly
Hughes, Karen Malpede, Terrence McNally, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, whose Angels in
America won the Tony Award two years in a row, and composer-playwright Jonathan Larson,
whose musical Rent ran for over twelve years.[4]

The full range of dramatic styles, genres and traditions are represented, from widely studied
and frequently performed plays to important examples of radical theater, regional theater,
postcolonial theater, women's theater and popular forms such as melodrama, farce and
thriller that are often under-represented in surveys of the period.

In the 1920s realism had become widespread in England France an United States where
thatre boomed.There were 200 to 275 new productions a year average.One in the important
groups that enhanced the theatrical presence in the US was THEATRE GUILD founded in
1919 with the intention of bringin important foreign works to improve theatre in the US.By the
mid 1920s playwrights the US were also competing to have their works produced by the
Theatre Guild.

Paul Eliot Green (March 17, 1894 May 4, 1981) was an American playwright best known
for his depictions of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He
received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom. It was also
included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927. Green first attracted attention with
his 1925 one-act play The No 'Count Boy which was produced by the New York Theatre
Club. The next year his full-length play In Abraham's Bosom was produced by
the Provincetown Players and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play was
considered remarkable for its depiction of African Americans in the South. Its hero, a man of
mixed racial ancestry, finds his idealistic attempts to better the lives of the African Americans
around him doomed to failure. With this success, Green quickly was recognized as one of
the leading regional voices in the American theatre. His plays were often compared with the
folk plays of Irish playwright John Millington Synge.

EUGENE O`NEILL

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 November 27, 1953) was an Irish American
playwright and Nobel laureate inLiterature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to
introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian
playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish
playwright August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include speeches in
American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, where they struggle to
maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. Of
his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!).[1][2] Nearly all of his other
plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.
((((O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression and
alcoholism. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW), which was fighting for improved living conditions for the working class
utilizing quick 'on the job' direct action.[8] O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie (who
drank himself to death at the age of 45) died within three years of one another, not long after
he had begun to make his mark in the theater. Despite his depression, he had a deep love
for the sea, and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set
onboard ships like the ones that he worked on.)))))))))

O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great
acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor
Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S. occupation of
Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. [10] His best-known plays
include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922),Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange
Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known
comedy,Ah, Wilderness!,[2][11] a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been. In
1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature

He was also part of the modern movement to revive the classical heroic mask from ancient
Greek theatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays, such as The Great God
Brown and Lazarus Laughed.[12]

O'Neill was very interested in the Faust theme, especially in the 1920s.[13]

BEYOND THE HORIZON

Beyond the Horizon is a 1920 play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It was
O'Neill's first full-length work, and the winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The play focuses on the portrait of a family, and particularly two brothers Andrew and Robert.

In the first act of the play, Robert is about to go off to sea with their uncle Dick, a sea captain
while Andrew looks forward to marrying his sweetheart Ruth and working on the family farm
as he starts a family.

Beyond the Horizon explores what happens when two men love the same woman and the
compromises each will make to have her. Eugene ONeill won the Pulitzer Prize for this 1920
drama.
Long Day's Journey into Night is a drama in four acts written by American
playwright Eugene O'Neill in 194142 but only published in 1956. The play is widely
considered to be his masterwork. O'Neill posthumously received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for
Drama for the The action covers a single day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August
1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyronesthe semi-autobiographical
representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte
Cristo Cottage.

One theme of the play is addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. All three males
are alcoholics and Mary is addicted tomorphine. In the play the characters conceal, blame,
resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate
and sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation

work. Long Day's Journey Into Night was first performed by the Royal Dramatic
Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden. During O'Neill's lifetime, the Swedish people had embraced
his work to a far greater extent than had any other nation, including his own.

ANALYSIS- Long Day's Journey into Night is undoubtedly a tragedy--it leaves the audience
with a sense of catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing of powerful events, and it
depicts the fall of something that was once great.

The play is largely autobiographical; it resembles O'Neill's life in many aspects. O'Neill
himself appears in the play in the character of Edmund, the younger son who, like O'Neill,
suffers from consumption. Indeed, some of the parallels between this play and O'Neill's life
are striking. Like Tyrone, O'Neill's father was an Irish Catholic, an alcoholic, and a Broadway
actor. Like Mary, O'Neill's mother was a morphine addict, and she became so around the
time O'Neill was born. Like Jamie, O'Neill's older brother did not take life seriously, choosing
to live a life of whores, alcohol, and the fast-paced reckless life of Broadway. Finally, O'Neill
had an older brother named Edmund who died in infancy; in this play, Edmund has an older
brother named Eugene who died in infancy.

The play, published posthumously, represents O'Neill's last words to the literary world. It is
important to note that his play is not condemning in nature; no one character is meant to be
viewed as particularly worse than any other. This is one of the play's great strengths; it is fair
and unbiased, and it shows that many character flaws can be seen as positives when viewed
in a different light. Thus,Long Day's Journey into Night invests heavily in the politics of
language. It is a world in which there is a large weight placed on the weakness of
"stinginess" versus the virtue of "prudence."

The play also creates a world in which communication has broken down. One of the great
conflicts in the play is the characters' uncanny inability to communicate despite their constant
fighting. . It is important to note that Long Day's Journey into Night is not only a journey
forward in time, but also a journey back into the past lives of all the characters, who
continually dip back into their old lifestyles. We are left as an audience realizing that the
family is not making progress towards betterment, but rather continually sliding into despair,
as they remain bound to a past that they can neither forget nor forgive.

The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the future
for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol
and morphine. This play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published, and it
has remained one of the most admired plays of the 20th century. Perhaps most importantly, it
has achieved commercial success because nearly every family can see itself reflected in at
least some parts of the play. The Tyrone family is not a unique family, and it is easy to
identify with many of the conflicts and characters. The play has a unique appeal to both the
individual audience member and to scholars of American drama, which explains its
popularity and enduring acclaim.

Desire Under the Elms is a play by Eugene O'Neill, published in 1924, and is now
considered an American classic. Along with Mourning Becomes Electra, it represents one of
O'Neill's attempts to place plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy in a rural New
England setting. It is in context a tribute to the myth of Phaedra, Hippolytus and Theseus.

Desire Under the Elms draws from Euripides Hippolytus and Jean Racines Phdre, both of
which feature a father returning home with a new wife who falls in love with her stepson.
Desire Under the Elms, tragedy in three parts by Eugene ONeill, produced in 1924 and
published in 1925. The last of ONeills naturalistic plays and the first in which he re-created
the starkness of Greek tragedy, Desire Under the Elms draws
from Euripides Hippolytus and Jean Racines Phdre, both of which feature a father
returning home with a new wife who falls in love with her stepson.
In this play Ephraim Cabot abandons his farm and his three sons, who hate him. The
youngest son, Eben, buys out his brothers, who head off to California. Shortly after this,
Ephraim returns with Abbie, his young new wife. Abbie becomes pregnant by Eben; she lets
Ephraim believe that the child is his, thinking the child will secure her hold on the farm, but
she later kills the infant when she sees it as an obstacle between her and Eben. Enraged,
Eben turns Abbie over to the sheriff, but not before he realizes his love for her and confesses
his complicity.
One of ONeills most-admired works, Desire Under the Elms invokes the playwrights own
family conflicts and Freudian treatment of sexual themes. Although the play is now
considered a classic of 20th-century American drama, it scandalized some early audiences
with its treatment of infanticide, alcoholism, vengeance, and incest; the first Los Angeles cast
was arrested for performing an obscene work.

In Greek mythology, Phaedra (Ancient Greek: - Phaidra) is the daughter

of Minos and Pasipha, wife of Theseus, sister of Ariadne, and the mother of Demophon of
Athens and Acamas. Phaedra's name derives from the Greek word (phaidros),
which meant "bright".

Though married to Theseus, Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, Theseus' son born by
either Hippolyta,

TENNESSE WILLIAMS

Outsiders trapped in a hostile environment

Characters are usually victims who are unable to comprehend

their world

Uses lyrical and poetic language and symbolism to create compassion for
characters

The Glass Menagerie[1] is a four-character memory play by Tennessee Williams which

premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong
autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on Williams himself, his histrionic
mother, and his mentally fragile sister Laura= "Blue Roses"IN THE PLAY

The Difficulty of Accepting Reality

Among the most prominent and urgent themes of The Glass Menagerie is the difficulty the
characters have in accepting and relating to reality. Each member of the Wingfield family is
unable to overcome this difficulty, and each, as a result, withdraws into a private world of
illusion where he or she finds the comfort and meaning that the real world does not seem to
offer. Of the three Wingfields, reality has by far the weakest grasp on Laura. The private
world in which she lives is populated by glass animalsobjects that, like Lauras inner life,
are incredibly fanciful and dangerously delicate. Unlike his sister, Tom is capable of
functioning in the real world, as we see in his holding down a job and talking to strangers.
But, in the end, he has no more motivation than Laura does to pursue professional success,
romantic relationships, or even ordinary friendships, and he prefers to retreat into the
fantasies provided by literature and movies and the stupor provided by drunkenness.
Amandas relationship to reality is the most complicated in the play. Unlike her children, she
is partial to real-world values and longs for social and financial success. Yet her attachment
to these values is exactly what prevents her from perceiving a number of truths about her
life. She cannot accept that she is or should be anything other than the pampered belle she
was brought up to be, that Laura is peculiar, that Tom is not a budding businessman, and
that she herself might be in some ways responsible for the sorrows and flaws of her children.
Amandas retreat into illusion is in many ways more pathetic than her childrens, because it is
not a willful imaginative construction but a wistful distortion of reality.

SYMBOLS

Lauras Glass Menagerie

As the title of the play informs us, the glass menagerie, or collection of animals, is the
plays central symbol. Lauras collection of glass animal figurines
represents a number of facets of her personality. Like the figurines, Laura is
delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned. Glass is transparent, but,
when light is shined upon it correctly, it refracts an entire rainbow of colors.
Similarly, Laura, though quiet and bland around strangers, is a source of
strange, multifaceted delight to those who choose to look at her in the right
light. The menagerie also represents the imaginative world to which Laura
devotes herselfa world that is colorful and enticing but ba The Glass
Unicorn

The glass unicorn in Lauras collectionsignificantly, her favorite figurerepresents her

peculiarity. As Jim points out, unicorns are extinct in modern times and are lonesome as a
result of being different from other horses. Laura too is unusual, lonely, and ill-adapted to
existence in the world in which she lives. The fate of the unicorn is also a smaller-scale
version of Lauras fate in Scene Seven. When Jim dances with and then kisses Laura, the
unicorns horn breaks off, and it becomes just another horse. Jims advances endow Laura
with a new normalcy, making her seem more like just another girl, but the violence with which
this normalcy is thrust upon her means that Laura cannot become normal without somehow
shattering. Eventually, Laura gives Jim the unicorn as a souvenir. Without its horn, the
unicorn is more appropriate for him than for her, and the broken figurine represents all that
he has taken from her and destroyed in her.
Blue Roses

Like the glass unicorn, Blue Roses, Jims high school nickname for Laura, symbolizes
Lauras unusualness yet allure. The name is also associated with Lauras attraction to Jim
and the joy that his kind treatment brings her. Furthermore, it recalls Tennessee Williamss
sister, Rose, on whom the character of Laura is based.

The Fire Escape

Leading out of the Wingfields apartment is a fire escape with a landing. The fire escape
represents exactly what its name implies: an escape from the fires of frustration and
dysfunction that rage in the Wingfield household. Laura slips on the fire escape in Scene
Four, highlighting her inability to escape from her situation. Tom, on the other hand,
frequently steps out onto the landing to smoke, anticipating his eventual getaway.

sed on fragile illusions.

J I M : Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken?

L A U R A : Now it is just like all the other horses.

J I M : Its lost its

L A U R A : Horn! It doesnt matter. . . . [smiling] Ill just imagine he had an operation. The horn

was removed to make him feel lessfreakish!

This exchange, also from Scene Seven, occurs not long after the previous one. After
persuading Laura to dance with him, Jim accidentally bumps the table on which the glass
unicorn rests, breaking the horn off of the figurine. Apparently, Lauras warning to him about
the delicacy of the glass objects reflects a very reasonable caution, but Jim fails to take the
warning seriously enough. The accident with the unicorn foreshadows his mishandling of
Laura, as he soon breaks her heart by announcing that he is engaged.

Just as Jims clumsy advances make Laura seem and feel like an ordinary girl, his clumsy
dancing turns her beloved unicorn into an ordinary horse. For the time being, Laura is
optimistic about the change, claiming that the unicorn should be happy to feel like less of a
misfit, just as she herself is temporarily happy because Jims interest in her makes her feel
like less of an outcast. Laura and the glass unicorn have similar fragility, however, and Laura,
perhaps knowingly, predicts her own fate when she implies that no matter how careful Jim
might be, her hopes will end up shattered.

emories of Laura chase him wherever he goes, and those memories prove as confining as
the Wingfield apartment.

Toms statement that I am more faithful than I intended to be! indicates that Tom is fully
aware that deserting his family was a faithless and morally reprehensible act, and the guilt
associated with it may have something to do with his inability to leave Laura fully behind. But
the word faithful also has strong associations with the language of lovers. A number of
critics have suggested that Toms character is influenced by an incestuous desire for Laura.
The language used in this sentence and the hold that Laura maintains over Toms memory
help to support this theory.

"Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the
typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in
to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too
tired to remove his clothes."

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 February 10, 2005)[1][2] was an American playwright
and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include
plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible(1953) and A
View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955; revised two-act, 1956), as well as the film The
Misfits (1961).

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s,
a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee,
received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and was married to Marilyn Monroe. In 2002 he
received the Prince of Asturias Award and in 2003 the Jerusalem Prize.

n 1948 Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, in less than a day, he wrote
Act I of Death of a Salesman. Within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play,[7]one of the
classics of world theater.[5][17] Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10,
1949 at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy
Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy.
The play was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for
Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It
was the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was performed 742 times.
[5]

In 1952, Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC);
unwilling to risk his promising career in Hollywood for the Communist cause that he had
come to despise, Kazan named eight members of the Group Theatre, including Clifford
Odets, Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield,[18] who in
recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party.[19] After speaking with
Kazan about his testimony Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts to research the witch
trials of 1692.[1] The Crucible, in which Miller likened the situation with the House Un-
American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem in 1692, [20][21] opened at the Beck
Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953. Though widely considered only somewhat
successful at the time of its initial release, today The Crucible is Miller's most frequently
produced work throughout the world [1] and was adapted into an opera by Robert Ward, which
won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1962. Miller and Kazan were close friends throughout the
late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to the HUAC, the pair's friendship
ended, and they did not speak to each other for the next ten years. [19]The HUAC took an
interest in Miller himself not long after The Crucible opened, denying him a passport to
attend the play's London opening in 1954. [7] Kazan defended his own actions through his
film On the Waterfront, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union
boss.

Miller died of heart failure after a battle against cancer, pneumonia and congestive heart
disease at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had been in hospice care at his sister's
apartment in New York since his release from hospital the previous month. [45] He died on the
evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a
Salesman), aged 89, surrounded by Barley, family and friends. [46][47] He is interred at
Roxbury Center Cemetery in Roxbury.

Death of a Salesman

Often classified as a modern tragedy of the common man

Willy Loman has been a traveling salesman for thirty-four years. He

likes to think of himself as being vital to the New England territory. He
 asks his wife Linda about his sons, who are home for the first time in
years. Willy has trouble understanding why Biff, his thirty-four year old
son, cannot find a job and keep it. Biff is attractive and was a star
football player in high school with several scholarships; however, he
could not finish his education, for he flunked math. When Biff went to
Boston to find his father and explain the failure to him, he found Willy
in his hotel room having an affair with a strange woman. Afterwards,
Biff held a grudge against his father, never trusting him again.

Willy explains to his sons that the important things in life are to be well
liked and to be attractive. While Biff plans to start his own business
with his brother Happy, Willy goes to his boss where he is told that he
cannot even represent the firm in New England any more. This news
turns Willy's life upside- down. Suddenly unemployed, he feels
frightened and worthless.

Biff admits that he is tired of living a life filled with illusion and plans to
tell his father not to expect anything from him anymore. Biff tries to
explain to Willy that he has no real skills and no leadership ability. In
order to save his father from disappointment, he suggests that they
never see one another again. Willy still refuses to listen to what Biff is
saying; he tells Biff how great he is and how successful he can become.
Biff is frustrated because Willy refuses to face the truth. In anger, Biff
breaks down and sobs, telling Willy just to forget about him.

The American Dream

Willy believes wholeheartedly in what he considers the promise of the American Dreamthat
a well liked and personally attractive man in business will indubitably and deservedly
acquire the material comforts offered by modern American life. Oddly, his fixation with the
superficial qualities of attractiveness and likeability is at odds with a more gritty, more
rewarding understanding of the American Dream that identifies hard work without complaint
as the key to success. Willys interpretation of likeability is superficialhe childishly dislikes
Bernard because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willys blind faith in his stunted version of the
American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline when he is unable to accept the
disparity between the Dream and his own life.

tten man.

Betrayal
Willys primary obsession throughout the play is what he considers to be Biffs betrayal of his
ambitions for him. Willy believes that he has every right to expect Biff to fulfill the promise
inherent in him. When Biff walks out on Willys ambitions for him, Willy takes this rejection as
a personal affront (he associates it with insult and spite). Willy, after all, is a salesman,
and Biffs ego-crushing rebuff ultimately reflects Willys inability to sell him on the American
Dreamthe product in which Willy himself believes most faithfully. Willy assumes that Biffs
betrayal stems from Biffs discovery of Willys affair with The Womana betrayal of Lindas
love. Whereas Willy feels that Biff has betrayed him, Biff feels that Willy, a phony little fake,
has betrayed him with his unending stream of ego-stroking lies.

Mythic Figures

Willys tendency to mythologize people contributes to his deluded understanding of the

world. He speaks of Dave Singleman as a legend and imagines that his death must have
been beautifully noble. Willy compares Biff and Happy to the mythic Greek figures Adonis
and Hercules because he believes that his sons are pinnacles of personal attractiveness
and power through well liked-ness; to him, they seem the very incarnation of the American
Dream.

The American West, Alaska, and the African Jungle

These regions represent the potential of instinct to Biff and Willy. Willys father found success
in Alaska and his brother, Ben, became rich in Africa; these exotic locales, especially when
compared to Willys banal Brooklyn neighborhood, crystallize how Willys obsession with the
commercial world of the city has trapped him in an unpleasant reality. Whereas Alaska and
the African jungle symbolize Willys failure, the American West, on the other hand,
symbolizes Biffs potential.

Seeds represent for Willy the opportunity to prove the worth of his labor, both as a salesman
and a father.

Diamonds

To Willy, diamonds represent tangible wealth and, hence, both validation of ones labor (and
life) and the ability to pass material goods on to ones offspring, two things that Willy
desperately craves. Correlatively, diamonds, the discovery of which made Ben a fortune,
symbolize Willys failure as a salesman.

The Rubber Hose

The rubber hose is a stage prop that reminds the audience of Willys desperate attempts at
suicide. He has apparently attempted to kill himself by inhaling gas, which is, ironically, the
very substance essential to one of the most basic elements with which he must equip his
home for his familys health and comfortheat. Literal death by inhaling gas parallels the
metaphorical death that Willy feels in his struggle to afford such a basic necessity.

Willy poses this question to Howard Wagner in Act II, in Howards office. He is discussing
how he decided to become a salesman after meeting Dave Singleman, the mythic salesman
who died the noble death of a salesman that Willy himself covets. His admiration of
Singlemans prolonged success illustrates his obsession with being well liked. He fathoms
having people remember and love him as the ultimate satisfaction, because such warmth
from business contacts would validate him in a way that his familys love does not. In so
highly esteeming Singleman and deeming his on-the-job death as dignified, respectable, and
graceful, Willy fails to see the human side of Singleman, much as he fails to see his own
human side. He envisions Singleman as a happy man but ignores the fact that Singleman
was still working at age eighty-four and might likely have experienced the same financial
difficulties and consequent pressures and misery as Willy.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1962 play by Edward Albee. It examines the
breakdown of the marriage of a middle-aged couple, Martha and George. Late one evening
after a university faculty party, they receive an unwitting younger couple, Nick and Honey as
guests, and draw them into their bitter and frustrated relationship. The play is in three acts,
normally taking a little less than three hours to perform, with two 10-minute intermissions.
The title is a pun on the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's The
Three Little Pigs (1933), substituting the name of the celebrated English author Virginia
Woolf. Martha and George repeatedly sing this version of the song throughout the play.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the
1962'63 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It is frequently revived on the
modern stage. The film adaptation was released in 1966, written by Ernest Lehman, directed
by Mike Nichols, and starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy
Dennis.

Themes[edit]
Reality and Illusion[edit]
While other plays establish the difference reality and illusion respectively, Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? starts out with the latter but leans to the former. More specifically, "George
and Martha have evaded the ugliness of their marriage by taking refuge in illusion." [2] The
disappointment that is their life together lead to the bitterness between them. Having no real
bond, or at least none that either are willing to admit, they become dependent upon a fake
child. The fabrication of a child, as well as the impact its supposed demise has on Martha,
questions the difference between deception and reality. As if to spite their efforts, the
contempt that Martha and George have for one another causes the destruction of their
illusion. This lack of illusion does not result in any apparent reality. "All truth," as George
admits, "[becomes] relative." [3]

Critique of the Societal Expectations[edit]

Christopher Bigsby asserts that this play stands as an opponent of the idea of a perfect
American family and societal expectations as it "attacks the false optimism and myopic
confidence of modern society."[4] Albee takes a heavy-handed approach to the display of this
contrast, making examples out of every character and their own expectations for the people
around them. Societal norms of the 1950's consisted of a nuclear family, two parents and a
child. This conception was picturesque in the idea that the father was the breadwinner, the
mother was a housewife, and the child was well-behaved. Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? smashes these conventions and shows realistic families that are far from perfect and
possibly ruined. The families of Honey and Martha were dominated by their fathers, there
being no sign of a mother-figure in their lives. George and Martha's chance at a perfect
family was ruined by infertility and George's failure at becoming a prominent figure at the
university. Being just a few of many, these examples directly challenge social expectations
both within and outside of a family setting.

Title[edit]
The play's title, which alludes to the English novelist Virginia Woolf, is also a reference to the
song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's animated version of The Three
Little Pigs.

Albee described the inspiration for the title thus:

"I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped
up in my mind again. And of course, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's
afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who's afraid of living life without false illusions. And it
did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke."
SummarThe play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is set on the campus of a small, New
England university. It opens with the main characters, George and Martha coming home from
a party at her father's house. The two of them clearly care deeply for each other, but events
have turned their marriage into a nasty battle between two disenchanted, cynical enemies.
Even though the pair arrives home at two o'clock in the morning, they are expecting guests:
the new math professor and his wife.

Of course, as it turns out, this new, young professor, Nick, actually works in the biology
department. He and his wife, Honey, walk into a brutal social situation. In the first act, "Fun
and Games," Martha and George try to fight and humiliate each other in new, inventive ways.
As they peel away each other's pretenses and self-respect, George and Martha use Honey
and Nick as pawns, transforming their guests into an audience to witness humiliation, into
levers for creating jealousy, and into a means for expressing their own sides of their mutual
story. In the second act, "Walpurgisnacht," these games get even nastier. The evening turns
into a nightmare. George and Martha even attack Honey and Nick, attempting to force them
to reveal their dirty secrets and true selves. Finally, in the last act, "The Exorcism,"
everyone's secrets have been revealed and purged. Honey and Nick go home, leaving
Martha and George to try to rebuild their shattered marriage.
y

Games and War

The title of the first act is "Fun and Games." That in itself is deceptive, for the games
that George and Martha play with their guests are not the expected party games.
Rather, their games of Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, and Hump the Hostess
which involves the characters' deepest emotions. George's characterization of these
emotionally destructive activities as games and assumption of the role of ring master
reveals that all the events of the evening are part of a power struggle between him
and Martha, in which one of them intends to emerge as victor. Martha and George's
verbal banter and one upsmanship is also characteristic of their ongoing game-
playing. Years of marriage have turned insults into a finely honed routine. By
characterizing these activities of games, Albee does not suggest that they are
frivolous or meaningless. Rather, he likens game-playing to war and demonstrates
the degree to which George and Martha are committed to destroying each other.
George and Martha in fact declare "all out war" on each other. What begins as a
game and a diversion escalates over the course of the play until the characters try to
destroy each other and themselves.

The Christian allegory

Subtle references to Christianity, particularly to Catholic rites and rituals, abound in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. For instance, Martha refers to her (imaginary) son as
a "poor lamb," making him a Christ symbol for Jesus is also known as the Lamb of
God. George chants the Kyrie Eleison, Dies Irae, and Requiem from Catholic liturgy.
The doorbells chimes which sound at the end of the second act echo the chimes that
sound during a Catholic mass. Albee even names the third act of the play "The
Exorcism." That name, of course, refers to George's attempt to kill the "son" and
thus exorcise illusion from his marriage. The killing of the "lamb" can also be seen as
a sacrifice necessary to save George and Martha's marriage. George calls the
proceedings "an Easter pageant," referencing the day the Lamb of God was sacrificed
to save the world, and the scene even takes place early on a Sunday morning.

Love and Hate

In his portrayal of George and Martha's marriage, Albee seems to make the not-
uncommon literary assertion that love and hate are two parts of a single whole. From
their vitriolic banter, it clearly appears that George and Martha hate each other. In
fact, they say as much and even pledge to destroy each other. Nonetheless, there
are moments of tenderness that contradict this hatred. George even tells Nick not to
necessarily believe what he sees. Some of George and Martha's arguments are for
show, others are for the challenge of arguing, while still others are indeed meant to
hurt each other. However, Martha's declaration that George is really the only one who
can satisfy her suggests that there are or have been positive aspects to their
marriage. Clearly, as much as they fight, they also need each other, even if just to
maintain the illusions that keep them going.

The American Dream

The title of one of his earlier plays, the American Dream was a significant concern of
Albee's. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he explores the illusion of an American
dream that masks a core of destruction and failure. Writing during the Cold War,
Albee was responding to a public that was just beginning to question the patriotic
assumptions of the 1950's. His George and Martha reference patriotic namesakes
George and Martha Washington. Albee uses this symbolic first couple's unhappy
marriage as a microcosm for the imperfect state of America. When George and
Martha's marriage is revealed to be a sham based on the illusion of an imaginary
son, the viewer is led to question the illusions that similarly prop up the American
dream. Nick and Honey, a conventional American dream couple, are also revealed to
be presenting a falsely happy faade. They too secretly take advantage of and lie to
each other. What's more, Nick's name is a direct reference to Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev, and his threat to George and Martha's marriage references the Cold War
turmoil of America.