Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? invites us into the lives of bored history professor George (Richard Burton) and his dissatisfied wife Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) at two in the morning after a faculty party hosted by her father, the university's president. We observe their long, chronically dysfunctional, alcohol-soaked marriage now based largely on a combination of mutual contempt, abuse, and sado-masochistic role-playing. Every sentence serves as a derisive reference to old wounds and grievances, or as an opportunity to re-engage in such longstanding conflict. She offhandedly calls him a cluck, a simp, a swamp, and a sourpuss. He calls her a subhuman monster. In short order, as the animosity rises and the level of discourse sinks, one can't help but agree with them both. All of this unpleasant harpooning is a sampling of the couple's private game, a game that maintains their marriage, both foundering and steady as a rock, deadly and alive at the same time. The private game has private rules and when one breaks a rule, all the previous vileness pales in comparison to what is unleashed next. The mixture thickens as a smug new biology professor (George Segal) and his seemingly clueless wife (Sandy Dennis) stop by and are immediately infected by the foul atmosphere, the alcohol, and the sexual subtext. Does the older couple have a mysterious 16-year-old son or is he a fiction representing unfulfilled dreams? Is their relationship truth or an illusion? Stay tuned.