2. His reputation. Albee has won numerous awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes in drama for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994), and two Tony Awards for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance. In 1996, he was awarded a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award and in 1997 the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. Only Eugene has won four Pulitzer prizes. At the Kennedy Center Honors Ceremony in 1996, Albee was praised for his impact on American drama. He was honored for bursting "into the American theatrical scene in the late 1950s with a variety of plays that detailed the agonies and disillusionment of that decade and the transition from the placid Eisenhower years to the turbulent 1960s. Albee's plays, with their intensity, their grappling with modern themes, and their experiments in form, startled critics and audiences alike while changing the landscape of American drama."  He is often said to be the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill.

2. Social and political atmosphere of the Postwar times: confusion and polemics. Internally, the 1950s were a complacent times after the Depression. Americans were divided over the Korean war Chief Justice Earl Warren wanted to addres racial injustice. Americans were confused as ever. McCarthyism revealed a dark side of the American political psyche that elevated free thinking to anti-American activities.

Externally, the Soviets invaded Hungary; the Rosenbergs; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King
Consumerism elevated materialism to the essential of existence Allen Ginsberg; James Baldwin; Lorraine Hansberry; Jack Kerouac. There were doubts about the ebullience of the American dream

3. A Major American Playwright. Some of his best and controversial works include The Zoo Story, The American Dream, The Death of Bessie Smith, Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  His work is recognized as unique, uncompromising, controversial, and surely provocative. He is quick to admit that his work is "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of  complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen." 

4. Importance of the work. The plays deals about the psychic dislocations of people against the backdrop of our civilized culture left to us by the Greeks and the Romans who established guidelines to settle disputes in a way that would not interrupt social order. Theater is essentially an art of order and symestry according to Aristotle. The problems of the main characters reflects the issues debated by the whole nation and human existence (the relevance of what George call the survival kit). 

5. Albee's originality (recognized immediately in scholarly media)

• technical virtuosity as embedded in his language, witty dialogues
• some saw in the play a sociopolitical protest
• others saw a case of absurdist theater
• the son-myth episode and exorcism

1.  What do you think about George's speech against scientists? Is this complaint genuine or just another weapon to get even with Nick? P. 65-67.

2. Is Martha's and George's son real?

3.  The gun incident dramatizes into the open the belligerent psyche underlying the relationship between the two spouses. Do you think George could kill Martha? Why or why not?

4. What is the relevance of the following line: "Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference ..?" 

5. Act II is entitled "Walpurginacht ..." which means the old German witches' Sabbath. Does this label match the deeds we encounter in this part of the play?  Explain.

6. What is the use of the Bergin story in the framework of the play?