Title
The play's title alludes to the English novelist Virginia Woolf. She committed suicide at age 59 in 1941. She left behind a note in which she expressed love for her husband Leonard Woolf and sorrow for the anguish she was causing him.[8] Twenty years later, playwright Edward Albee corresponded with him, asking permission to use his late wife's name in the title of a new play, according to literary critic Leon Edel, an acquaintance of Leonard Woolf.[9] Woolf granted permission, according to Edel.[9]
Edward Albee's title also pokes fun at the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's animated version of The Three Little Pigs. Because the rights to the Disney song are expensive, most stage versions, and the film, have Martha sing to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush", a melody that fits the meter fairly well and is in the public domain. In the first few moments of the play, it is revealed that someone sang the song earlier in the evening at a party, although who first sang it (Martha or some other anonymous party guest) remains unclear. Martha repeatedly needles George over whether he found it funny.
Albee described the inspiration for the title:
I was in there [at a saloon in New York] 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.[10]
The title phrase happened to appear five years before the play's premiere, in a 1957 issue of The New Yorker:
A coffee fiend we know dropped into an espresso joint in Greenwich Village the other day and found himself whiling away his time reading the graffiti on the wall beside his chair. Most of the stuff was pretty humdrum, but he was arrested by a legend, done in elegant calligraphy, that read, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?"[11]
The New Yorker responded in 2013 by suggesting that perhaps the graffiti that Albee saw was the same graffiti that The New Yorker reported in 1957.[12]
Characters
In an interview, Albee said Martha and George were based on two of his friends, married New York socialites Willard Maas and Marie Menken.[13] Maas was a professor of literature at Wagner College and Menken was an experimental filmmaker and painter. Maas and Menken were known for their infamous salons, where drinking would "commence at 4 PM on Friday and end in the wee hours of night on Monday" (according to Gerard Malanga, an Andy Warhol associate and friend to Maas). The primary conflict between George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? derived from Maas's and Menken's tempestuous and volatile relationship.
