The play is set in a house in the campus of a New England college. George and Martha are married and have a stormy, passionate and intense relationship where they fight and verbally abuse each other all the time. Martha is the daughter of the president of the college where George teaches history. They invite another couple, Nick and Honey, to their house after a party. At home they continue drinking and start fighting after Martha calls her husband "a failure" in front of their guests, stressing the fact that he is still only an associate professor and that he is a failed novelist.

This speech is in the second act (titled Walpurgisnacht in reference to a pagan holiday in Northern Europe that celebrates supernatural spirits and the dead). After Martha starts describing her husband's only novel, George reacts violently towards her and the guests, telling everybody about his "second novel", which if fact is only the story of how Nick and Honey met and got married, that Nick had told George in the previous act...