Edward Albee

George, a history professor at a New England college, and Martha, the daughter of the college president, come home drunk at two in the morning from a faculty party, having invited a young couple back for a nightcap. Nick, a new biology professor, and his wife Honey arrive and are drawn into the older couple's practised warfare. Across three acts — Fun and Games, Walpurgisnacht, and The Exorcism — the four drink, and the games escalate: humiliating each other, exposing Nick's marriage to Honey as a matter of a false pregnancy and her father's money, Martha seducing Nick. The couple's most guarded material is their son, whom they discuss constantly and whom George finally announces has been killed. The son, it emerges, never existed; the fiction was theirs jointly, and George has destroyed it. Alone at dawn, Martha admits she is afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Albee takes the domestic realism of American theatre and runs absurdist procedure through it — the play observes the unities and looks naturalistic, but its engine is a set of ritual games with rules, and its climax is the killing of an imaginary person. Martin Esslin included Albee in his account of the Theatre of the Absurd, though Albee's absurdity is social rather than metaphysical: illusion is what makes the marriage liveable, and the exorcism leaves nothing certain in its place. The title, sung to the tune of a nursery rhyme, substitutes a modernist novelist for the big bad wolf, which is the play's joke about academia and about what the educated are actually frightened of.