Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A middle-aged couple invites a younger couple over for drinks after a faculty party, and the evening becomes a three-hour war of psychological annihilation. Albee stripped the American marriage comedy down to its bones. The play was denied the Pulitzer in 1963 because the advisory board found it too vulgar. It won anyway, eventually.
Nick and Honey get pulled into George and Martha's marital demolition derby after a faculty party and simply never leave, and skeptical readers keep asking the obvious question: “why would you STAY when the other couple start maliciously attacking.” The four acts run almost entirely on hostility, with little room to breathe between rounds; one reader admits “I just don't like all the squabbling constantly in the story” and another says flatly “the tone is just outright yelling and venom.” Several who came in expecting a canonical classic found the constant drinking and cruelty numbing rather than illuminating, one writing there is “no joy or heart or anything that touches me” in the whole evening. The script itself gets blamed too: reviewers say it reads thinner on paper than it plays live, and recommend seeing a staged or filmed version before picking up the text.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
