Confusion

So after a very relaxing and unproductive Spring Break, on Friday night, I finally decided to attempt to get back into somewhat of a "productive/working" mode... by watching clips of "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" on youtube (for anyone else curious about them here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H7IRs1vmS4)! Okay, although it wasn't the most productive thing I could have done, I think it helps a lot with remembering what happened in the play because you can better visualize the tensions between all the characters, especially Martha and George, clearly see their gradual escalation over the night to their declaration of “Total War” against each other.  I feel like they have quite a love and hate relationship because on one end, they’ve been with each other for so long that they are able to understand and care for each other because they know what difficulties they’ve both had to go through, but on the other end, the difficulties they’ve had to go through seems to have made them frustrated and embittered at each other, which spirals into the “Total War” and the death of their “blue haired blond eyed” son (it’s so funny that I didn’t notice that swap the first time I was reading it!).  But on the other hand, I’m not sure I can accurately understand the many aspects of their a bit convoluted relationship because I think you have to have been in such a relationship as Martha and George’s to understand why they act the way they do towards each other and why their past experiences together both connects them to each other but also tears them apart (or causes them to tear each other’s hearts apart).  I think that’s partly why I really confused for a while after I first finished reading the play and had a hard time discerning the sequence / significance of all the events.  Another factor of my confusion I think was the way the play was written—very little descriptions of the settings, minor scene changes only when necessary, and mostly just filled with back-and-forth shooting dialogue—which, though I like the almost minimalistic style of the dialogue and play set up, it gets somewhat confusing sometimes and it seemed easy to mix up who was talking with the one line dialogue. 

One of the aspects of the play that I never really quite figured out was whether or not the content in George’s novel that he originally wanted to get published were true or not.  I feel like he mentions or Martha mentions when she’s exposing all his life failures to the guests, by mimicking his response to her father (“Georgie said… but Daddy… I mean… ha ha ha ha…. But Sir, it isn’t a novel at all… …. this isn’t a novel at all… this is the truth… this really happened… TO ME!” (Act 2)) that the novel might have been autobiographical? And then later on George also tells Nick of the story of the boy he knew that accidently killed both his parents and was placed in a mental hospital and never spoke a word after that.  So I thought that story was intriguing but confusing on whether it really happened to George himself, though it definitely contributes to the build up of the George’s final decision.