Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.

“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is the title refrain of Edward Albee’s 1962 stage play, sung by the characters as a parody of the Disney song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” In the play’s late-night, alcohol-fueled setting—an academic town and a faculty household—the line functions as an in-joke and a taunt that recurs as George and Martha’s marital combat escalates. Albee reportedly took the phrase from a piece of graffiti he saw in a bar restroom, then built the play around it, using the chant as a thematic hook for the characters’ fear of living without comforting illusions.

The line works on two levels: as a comic cultural mash-up (high modernist author Virginia Woolf set against a children’s cartoon refrain) and as a serious thematic question. In Albee’s play, “Virginia Woolf” becomes shorthand for the bracing, unsentimental confrontation with reality—life stripped of self-deception, fantasy, and socially agreed-upon fictions. When the characters sing it, they are both mocking and testing one another: who can endure truth, emotional exposure, and the collapse of invented narratives? The chant’s childish cadence underscores how adult cruelty and fear can hide behind playful rituals.

“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (common capitalization variant: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”)