Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is Edward Albee's most affirmative play. Given the accusatorial narrative animating the play, calling this his most affirmative work may seem a bit curious. After all, George and Martha, and Nick and Honey, are characters who take delight in attacking others, in belittling those whose self-interests differ from their own, and in betraying those whose conceptions of reality differ from their own. Irony and sarcasm are born from characters who increasingly obey compulsions they seek to resist. And those compulsions have become so suffused within their language and action that these characters have devolved, in the Beckettian sense, into habit, their routines anesthetizing their responses to the self, the other, and the culture they inhabit.