Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I think we all are.

Even from the opening lines of dialogue, I automatically assumed this play was absurdist. For some reason, it reminded me a lot of Waiting for Godot in that these characters - Martha and George - are kind of just presented to the audience in medias res, and we are expected to decipher their erratic and seemingly unhinged behavior. It also helped that the fighting these two did seemed beyond pointless, stretching into ludicrous and, quite frankly, insane.  For a while, I thought Martha might have just been making the events of the night up, as George seemed relatively sane, but also bereft of any knowledge of anything that had happened before that very moment. The state of these two characters, coupled with the breakneck speed of their shifting emotional states, led me to believe I wouldn't understand a word of this play. Thankfully, once Nick and Honey arrived, the play seemed to more or less evolve into a tense living room drama, albeit with Martha and George still battling and all the characters dodging Martha's onslaught of ever-changing emotions. In fact, it actually helped to have Nick and Honey there, as their uneasy trepidation mirrored mine and helped me to see someone else in the world of the play who was just as confused and uncomfortable as I was reading the play. Once Nick and Honey settled in a bit, George and Martha started seeming less insane and more just hell-bent on the other's destruction, which I guess helped me settle into the play a bit. By the end, I understood the cause for George and Martha's fighting, and a bit of what Albee meant to say with this play, but overall, I feel he could've shortened and streamlined his message. As it is, the play is confusing and often just simply off-putting, as Albee seems to have housed his message in a play that is barely accessible at best and unsettlingly hostile at worst.