YMMV / Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Various theories, a popular one is that Martha is the only true person in the play, she's imagining all the others.
  • There's evidence that George is gay, having married Martha to try to advance himself. There are subtle moments when it seems George is hitting on Nick. Then again, just about everyone has a moment together at some point.
  • Honey's lost baby. Did she fake her pregnancy, did she suffer a miscarriage, or did she have an abortion? Nick thinks it was a Fake Pregnancy and she just had a medical condition that made her seem pregnant for a time; while that is certainly a possibility, he never learns that she has secretly been taking birth control pills throughout their marriage because she fears getting pregnant at all, which leaves open the chance that Honey actually had an abortion (and a late-term abortion at that).
  • Another fan theory is that George and Martha did have a child once — if George's drunken narration of an emotional story of a little boy is anything to be taken by — he died young in a tragic accident. So Martha copes by pretending that their child is still alive. Incensing George and putting a strain on their already toxic marriage.
  • When George addresses Honey as "monkey nipples" and "angel tits", was he really flirting with her, or was he just doing it simply to make Nick or Martha angry?
  • When George takes himself and an inebriated Honey back to his and Martha's house, he looks up at the bedroom window, sees Martha and Nick attempting to sleep together and he cries. Was George upset because his wife was cheating on him, or because his wife had stole his secret male crush away from him?
• Award Snub:
  • A rare example of it being done after getting awarded: It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but was revoked by the Moral Guardians on the advisory board. The film, on the other hand, was showered with 13 Oscar nominations, winning 5 - one of only two films that got nominated for every Oscar category it was eligible for (the other being Cimarron).
  • Despite still performing quite well at the Oscars, the film lost most of the big awards to A Man for All Seasons. A fine film in its own right, but about as safe an Oscar choice (a British-set historical drama based on an acclaimed play) as one can imagine, especially next to Woolf which has emerged as the more timeless and acclaimed piece.
  • It's often been pointed to as the film where Richard Burton should've won his Oscar. Burton himself was upset that he didn't win Best Actor for playing George, but said that if he had to lose he didn't mind losing to Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More.
  • Going even further, quite a few people say George Segal also should've won, believing the film was worthy of being the first picture to win all four acting categories.
• Cant Unhear It: Though many have gone one to portray George and Martha to much acclaim, discussion of the play always finds a way to circle back to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the film.
• Creepy Awesome: George proves to be by far the most effective player in all the verbal warring, and the results get quite frightening.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The relationship between George and Martha is extremely dark as it is, but it's even more disturbing when their married cinematic actors' marriage was famously revealed to be enormously dysfunctional in its own right.
• Ho Yay: It's possible to read subtext between George and Nick, as well as between Martha and Honey. Playwright Edward Albee himself was gay, though he himself said the play was primarily an examination of heterosexual relationships. (Sandy Dennis, who portrayed Honey in the film version, has also been identified as either lesbian or bisexual by several Hollywood historians and biographers, though she made no public mention of her relationships with women during her lifetime.)
  George: (to Nick...a solemn wink) There are, believe me, easier things in this world.
• Jerkass Woobie: All the characters have no problem insulting and attempting to humiliate each other, but deep down, we see that they are just miserable, sad people, trapped in their unhappy lives.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • This first came out during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People expecting to escape from the most terrifying two weeks in history instead found themselves confronted by (then) shocking language and one of the most depressing depictions of marriage ever.
  • George in general can be quite creepy given the way he disturbingly analyzes everyone around him in preparation to tear them down. Richard Burton's portrayal frequently alternates between looking lifeless and utterly mad.
• Periphery Demographic: The play picked up a substantial following among people with Borderline Personality Disorder thanks to them finding George and Martha's volatile dynamic that is rooted in deeply repressed trauma resonant with their own experiences. In fact, many people with BPD who use amateur acting as a form of therapy quickly gravitate towards this play.
• Once Original, Now Overdone: Though the dialogue is still quite hard hitting, the language is not nearly as shocking now as it was when the play premiered.
• Tear Jerker: Martha's freak out towards the end when her and George's "son" has been killed off, the pain emphasized further with Elizabeth Taylor's excellent acting in the 1966 film adaptation.

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