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Albee's Postmodern Family: Family Games and Storytelling in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee's representations of the theme of dysfunctional family culminate in Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which combines a realist critique of contemporary American culture and an absurdist interest in language games. In the manner of Samuel Beckett's narrative construction of familial relations and Harold Pinter's dramatization of male-female power struggles, Albee's characters construct an imaginary family through family games. These games replace the bankrupt metanarrative of the middle-class family, substituting it with verbal practices in which George and Martha perform man and wife. Their storytelling is the single most important ingredient of the family games through which the couple "conceive" and "kill" their son and retell the stories of their own and their parents' marriages. Albee's family games constitute, contrary to the common assumption that they belong to the realm of illusion, a peculiarly postmodern entity that exists in the performative present and subverts the "truth"/"illusion" binarism.