The lineage of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
may be drawn from several important bloodlines, the two strongest being the
American Realism of Eugene O’Neill in his plays The Iceman Cometh and Long
Day’s Journey into Night, and less realistic works of Europe from playwrights
such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and especially Harold Pinter, whose
The Birthday Party (1957) sets a similar tone of unconvincing and subversive
backstory that Albee uses to great effect and thematic purpose in his own
celebrated masterpiece. The classical traditions of stalwart categories like
Metaphysics gave way in the twentieth century to a more linguistic-based
philosophy, and Albee’s play replicates this shift in a meaningful way.
The intellectual level of puns and allusions points to the elevated
education level of the characters. The reality reflected in the stories told (out of
school, so to speak) points to a fundamental question of the nature of reality
itself, since any false story necessarily stands in for the truth of what actually
happened. Thus, Albee calls into question metaphysical reality versus illusion or
fiction at almost every twist in the plot. The concreteness of George and
Martha’s invented son in their own minds merely emphasizes the extent to
which truth has been supplanted by the conjured alternative reality they have
shared for more than a score of years. The substitution of a weaker “reality” for
the stark truth that they might suffer through calls to mind a parallel linguistic
substitution: the pronoun as a stand-in for an established person.
While absence is a theme explored to some degree throughout, the larger
concept of standing in for an absent object, which task the pronoun performs,
occurs more obliquely when George and the son are confused. Albee moves his
drama of drunken academic games from the particulars of the two couples into
the realm of metaphysical questioning of reality by imbuing the conversations
with the motif of pronoun confusion. This confusion-and-correction cycle
allows the characters to explore (willingly or otherwise) the nature of truth and
illusion, where an invented reality stands in for the awful existential reality that
pains them. Truth and illusion: we must know the difference, or at least carry on
as though we did.