ABSTRACT
This chapter, after an initial discussion of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, investigates all the character pairings. The brilliance of the living room setting in theatre, and particularly this living room setting, derives from the flexibility the playwright has to investigate particular combinations of characters. That is, given the audience’s focused gaze into a single room—much reminiscent of what we see in Harold Pinter’s theatre—the entrance and exit of characters allows for the playwright to look at a number of character dynamics by seeing each character interact with different characters. Thus, we do not just witness George and Martha, and then, when Nick and Honey arrive, George and Martha interacting with Nick and Honey, but the entrances and exits of the characters into and out of a single room allow Albee to isolate every possible combination of pairs of characters. And this ability to see each character interact with each of the other characters in isolation, away from the pressures and influences of a group, reveals the many sides of a character in quite effective ways.
