This content is from Wikipedia. We do not consider this content professional or citable. Please use your discretion when relying on it. GradeSaver also offers a professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors.

Plot summary

The play involves the two couples playing "games," which are savage verbal attacks against one or two of the others at the party. These games are referred to with sarcastically alliterative names: "Humiliate the Host", "Get the Guests", "Hump the Hostess", and "Bringing Up Baby".

"Fun and Games"

Martha, in the first act, "Fun and Games", taunts George. She stresses his failures, very nearly brutally, even after George reacts violently:

Martha: ...In fact, he was sort of a ... a FLOP! A great...big...fat...FLOP!

[CRASH! Immediately after FLOP! George breaks a bottle against the portable bar...]

George [almost crying]: I said stop, Martha.

Martha: I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You don't want to waste good liquor...not on your salary. Not on an Associate Professor's salary!

Nick and George are then alone. Nick talks about his wife and her hysterical pregnancy:

George [to Nick]: While she was up, you married her.

Nick: And then she went down.

George tells Nick a story about a boy who shot and killed his mother accidentally, and who while learning to drive kills his father: "with his learner's permit in his pocket...swerved the car, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a large tree...when they told him that his father was dead...he was put in an asylum." George tells this story early in the second act, but its echo reverberates throughout the play.

"Walpurgisnacht"

The title of the act refers to a pagan holiday in northern Europe, during which night the boundary between living and dead is weakened.

Once the wives rejoin the men, Martha begins to describe (in the face of a persistent protest from George) her husband's only novel, buried by her powerful and controlling father: "A novel about a naughty boychild...who killed his mother and his father dead." Martha continues: "Georgie said...but Sir, it isn't a novel at all...this really happened...TO ME!" The culmination of George's violent reaction to Martha's refusal to stop telling this story is to grab Martha by the throat and nearly strangle her. In his stage direction, Albee suggests that Nick may be making a connection between the "novel" and the story George had told him earlier.

Nick [remembering something related]: Hey...wait a minute...

Is George the boy who "killed his mother and his father"? If so, was he lying to Nick about the asylum, or is the "asylum" instead a metaphor? Is the asylum in his mind in the home in which he and Martha live? Is Martha lying about the novel, or is something else afoot? What is true is not clear. This emotionally and sometimes physically violent scene concludes the game of "Humiliate the Host."

In this act, George is quick to retort Martha's prior actions, in the next game, which he calls "Get the Guests." While Nick and George were talking earlier, Nick related the story of his and Honey's marriage. His now thoroughly drunken wife Honey realizes that George's story about "the Mousie" who "tooted brandy immodestly and spent half of her time in the upchuck", is about her and her hysterical pregnancy. She feels as if she is about to be sick and runs to the bathroom.

At the end of this scene, Martha starts to seduce Nick in George's presence. George reacts calmly, simply sitting and reading a book:

Martha: ...I said I was necking with one of the guests...

George: Yes, good...good for you. Which one?

Martha: Oh, I see what you're up to, you lousy little...

George: I'm up to page a hundred and...

At the end of the act, George throws his book against the door chimes in anguish; Honey returns, wondering who rang the doorbell. This gives George an idea, and leads into the next, crucial act of the play.

"The Exorcism"

In the third act, Martha appears alone on the stage, speaking in soliloquy. Nick joins her after a while, recalling Honey in the bathroom winking at him. The doorbell rings: it is George, with a bunch of snapdragons in his hand, calling out, "Flores para los muertos" (flowers for the dead, in a reference to a line in A Streetcar Named Desire). Martha and George argue about whether the moon is up or down (possibly a Taming of the Shrew reference): George insists it is up, while Martha says she saw no moon from the bedroom. George says that once, when he was in the Mediterranean, the moon went down and came up again. Nick asks whether this incident occurred after George killed his parents:

George [defiantly]: Maybe.

Martha: Yeah; maybe not, too.

...

George [to Nick]: Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference...?

George asks Nick to bring his wife back out for the final game "Bringing Up Baby." George and Martha supposedly have a son, about whom George has repeatedly told Martha to keep quiet. George now begins to talk about this son: "Martha...climbing all over the poor bastard, trying to break the bathroom door down to wash him in the tub when he's sixteen." Then George prompts Martha for her "recitation", in which they describe their son's upbringing in a duet:

Martha: It was an easy birth...

George: Oh, Martha; no. You labored...how you labored.

Martha: It was an easy birth...once it had been...accepted, relaxed into.

As this tale progresses, George begins to recite sections of the Dies Irae (part of the Requiem, the Latin mass for the dead), and in the end:

George: Martha...our son is...dead.

[Silence.]

He was...killed...late in the afternoon...

[Silence.]

[A tiny chuckle] on a country road, with his learner's permit in his pocket, he swerved, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a ...

Martha [rigid fury]: YOU...CAN'T...DO...THAT!

Supposing their son had been real, what had George done to prompt this response from Martha? (Note that if they had a son, he may have completed their lives, thus changing their respective characters. Also, there may have been no reason to fight or no bottled-up emotions, but this is not the case. The circumstances of their son's death were touched on earlier in the play in a different context.

Illusion and reality are indistinguishable throughout the play. George and Martha have created their son; he does not exist as George and Martha could not have children. George says that he "killed" their son because Martha broke their rule that she could not speak of their son to others. The play ends with George singing, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to Martha, whereupon she replies, "I am, George... I am."