Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

For the 1966 film adaptation, see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film).

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Written by	Edward Albee
Characters	Martha George Nick Honey
Date premiered	October 13, 1962
Place premiered	Billy Rose Theatre
Original language	English
Subject	Two married couples, one twenty years older and bitterer than the other, engage in an evening of merciless personal attack.
Genre	Drama
Setting	Martha and George's New England home
IBDB profile

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee that opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theater on October 13, 1962. The original cast featured Uta Hagen as Martha, Arthur Hill as George, Melinda Dillon as Honey and George Grizzard as Nick. It was directed by Alan Schneider. Subsequent cast members included Henderson Forsythe, Eileen Fulton, Mercedes McCambridge, and Elaine Stritch.

Because of the unusual length of the play (over three hours), prior to the opening a matinee company was also hired that performed twice a week and featured Kate Reid as Martha, Shepperd Strudwick as George, Avra Petrides as Honey and Bill Berger as Nick. And like the evening company these performances sold out as well.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962–63 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Its stars won the 1963 Tony Awards for Best Actor and Actress as well. It was also selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama by that award's drama jury. However, the award's advisory board—the trustees of Columbia University—objected to the play's then-controversial use of profanity and sexual themes, and overruled the award's advisory committee, awarding no Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1963.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play on the title of the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's The Three Little Pigs, but named after the famous English novelist.

Overview

In the play, George and Martha invite a new professor and his wife to their house after a party. Martha is the daughter of the president of the college (believed to be based on Trinity College, Connecticut) where George is an associate history professor. Nick (who is never addressed or introduced by name) is a biology professor (who Martha thinks teaches math), and Honey is his mousy, brandy-abusing wife. Once at home, Martha and George continue drinking and engage in relentless, scathing verbal and sometimes physical abuse in front of Nick and Honey. The younger couple are simultaneously fascinated and embarrassed. They stay even though the abuse turns periodically towards them as well.

The play's title, which alludes to the English novelist Virginia Woolf, is a parody of the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's animated version of The Three Little Pigs. Because obtaining the rights to use the music would have been expensive, most stage versions, and the film, have Martha sing to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush". This melody fits the meter fairly well and is in the public domain. In the first few moments of the play, it is revealed that someone sang the song earlier in the evening at a party, although who first sang it (Martha or some other anonymous party guest) remains unclear. Martha repeatedly needles George over whether he found it funny.

I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who's afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.

— Edward Albee

In interviews, Albee has said that he asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use her name in the title of the play. In another interview, Albee acknowledged that he based the characters of Martha and George on his good friends, New York socialites Willard Maas and Marie Menken. They share the names of President George Washington and his wife Martha Washington, America's first First Couple. Maas was a professor of literature at Wagner College (one similarity between the character George and Willard) and his wife Marie was an experimental filmmaker and painter. Maas and Menken were known for their infamous salons, where drinking would "commence at 4pm on Friday and end in the wee hours of night on Monday" (according to Gerard Malanga, Warhol associate and friend to Maas). The primary conflict between George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? derived from Maas and Menken's tempestuous and volatile relationship. Many darker veins running through the play's dialogue suggest that the border between fiction and reality is continually challenged. The play ends with Martha answering the titular question of who is afraid to live their life free of illusions with, "I am, George, I am." Implicitly, exposure is something everyone fears: façade (be it social or psychological), although damaging, provides a comfort.

Plot summary

The play involves the two couples playing "games," which are savage verbal attacks against one or two of the others at the party. These games are referred to with sarcastically alliterative names: "Humiliate the Host", "Get the Guests", "Hump the Hostess", and "Bringing Up Baby".

Act One - "Fun and Games"

George and Martha return from a faculty party, but Martha soon informs George that she has invited over guests. These guests, Nick and his wife, Honey, are much younger than George and Martha. During the "after-party" Martha taunts George. She stresses his failures brutally and drives him out of the room. Martha then tells an embarrassing story about how she humiliated him with a sucker punch in front of her father. During the telling George appears with a gun; he fires it and an umbrella pops out. Even after this joke, Martha's taunts continue. Nick and Honey grow uneasy; George reacts violently. Honey runs to the bathroom to vomit.

Act Two - "Walpurgisnacht"

Nick and George are then alone. Nick talks about his wife and her hysterical pregnancy. George proceeds to tell Nick a story about visiting a gin mill with a boarding school classmate. This friend had killed his mother accidentally by shooting her. He was laughed at for ordering "bergin", killed his father while driving, and was committed to an asylum shortly thereafter where he never spoke again. George and Nick argue. Eventually, George calls Nick a "smug son of a bitch." Once the wives rejoin the men, Martha begins to describe (in the face of a persistent protest from George) her husband's only novel, buried by her powerful and controlling father, a work which turns out to be embarrassingly autobiographical. The culmination of George's violent reaction to Martha's refusal to stop telling this story is to grab Martha by the throat and nearly strangle her. In his stage direction, Albee suggests that Nick may be making a connection between the "novel" and the story George had told him earlier.

George is quick to retort Martha's prior actions, in the next game, which he calls "Get the Guests." George tells an extemporaneous tale of "the Mousie" who "tooted brandy immodestly and spent half of her time in the upchuck," and Nick's thoroughly drunk wife realizes that the story is about her and her hysterical pregnancy. She feels as if she is about to be sick and runs to the bathroom again.

At the end of this scene, Martha starts to seduce Nick in George's presence. George reacts calmly, simply sitting and reading a book. As Martha and Nick walk upstairs, George throws his book against the door chimes in anguish; Honey returns, wondering who rang the doorbell and George comes up with an idea to get Martha, he plans on telling Martha that their son has died. And the act ends as George tells an invisible Martha that their son has died.

Act Three - "The Exorcism"

Martha appears alone in the living room, shouting at the others to come out from hiding. Nick joins her after a while, recalling Honey in the bathroom winking at him. The doorbell rings: it is George, with a bunch of snapdragons in his hand, calling out, "Flores para los muertos" (flowers for the dead). Martha and George argue about whether the moon is up or down: George insists it is up, while Martha says she saw no moon from the bedroom. This leads to a discussion where Martha and George insult Nick in tandem, an argument that reveals that Nick was too drunk to have sex with Martha upstairs anyway.

George asks Nick to bring his wife back out for the final game "Bringing Up Baby." George and Martha have a son, about whom George has repeatedly told Martha to keep quiet over the course of the night, but now George talks about Martha's overbearingness toward their son. George then prompts Martha for her "recitation", in which they describe their son's upbringing in a bizarre duet. Martha describes their son's beauty and talents and then accuses George of ruining his life. As this tale progresses, George begins to recite sections of the Libera me (part of the Requiem, the Latin mass for the dead).

At the end of the tale, George informs Martha that the door chimes heard earlier was a boy from Western Union who brought a telegram that said their son had died: "killed late in the afternoon ... on a country road, with his learner's permit in his pocket, he swerved, to avoid a porcupine"—a description that matches that of the boy in the gin mill story told earlier. Martha screams "You can't do that!" and collapses.

It becomes clear that George and Martha never had a son and George has decided to "kill" him. Martha broke their rule that she could not speak of their son to others. Nick and Honey leave, realizing what has happened. The play ends with George singing, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to Martha, whereupon she replies, "I am, George... I am."

The play itself is performed in three acts, and is a little under three hours long: 1 hour, 1 hour, 40 minutes, with two 10-minute intermissions.

Original Broadway Cast Album

In 1963, Columbia Masterworks released a four-LP (long-playing) boxed recording of the original Broadway cast performing the entire play under the direction of Alan Schneider.

The release contained a sixteen-page booklet with photos from the original production, critical essays by Harold Clurman and Walter Kerr, cast and crew biographies, and a short article by Goddard Lieberson on the task of recording the play. The introduction is by Edward Albee, in which he relates, "I cannot conceive of anyone wanting to buy [this] massive album; but...every playwright wants as much permanence for his work as he can get."

The recording was issued in both stereo (DOS 687) and monaural (DOL 287) formats. It is out-of-print and was never re-released in other formats and is highly prized among collectors, as plays with such adult themes were never recorded for the general public before.

2004 to 2011 productions

Starting in 2004 and continuing into 2005, there was a new Broadway production of the play. The production was directed by Anthony Page and starred Kathleen Turner as Martha and Bill Irwin as George. Irwin won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Actor for his role. The production was transferred to London's West End with the entire original cast, and as of March 2006 was playing at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. In January 2007, the Turner-Irwin production was performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., for a month-long run. On February 6, 2007, the production began a six-week run at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

The play went on tour in the US and played in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Theater from April 11 to May 12, 2007. This production excluded key moments in the original production. These exclusions arguably diminished the cathartic impact of the original text and production and the film and was subsequently panned by several area critics.

On December 12, 2010, the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Illinois began performances of the play featuring veteran actors Amy Morton as Martha and Tracy Letts (the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of August: Osage County) as George. The production was directed by Pam MacKinnon, who has said she is an 'acolyte' of Albee's works and is preferred by Albee himself to direct them. The playwright even flew in to Chicago, visited rehearsals, and gave his blessings, as he has been known to rescind permission to have his works performed.^{[citation needed]}

Meg Tilly returned to acting in 2011 playing Martha in a production by Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre. The show ran July 5, 2011 - July 17, 2011 in Victoria, B.C.

Film

Main article: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film)

A film adaptation of the play was released in 1966. It was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, Richard Burton as George, George Segal as Nick and Sandy Dennis as Honey.

Jack Valenti identifies the film as the first controversial movie he had to deal with as president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The movie was the first to use the word "screw" and the phrase "hump the hostess" on screen. As he says, "In company with the MPAA's general counsel, Louis Nizer, I met with Jack Warner, the legendary chieftain of Warner Bros., and his top aide, Ben Kalmenson. We talked for three hours, and the result was deletion of "screw" and retention of "hump the hostess," but I was uneasy over the meeting."

Original Film Soundtrack Album

The film was given a "Deluxe Edition Two-Record Set" soundtrack album release in 1967 by Warner Bros. Records, and was the first film to have its vocals be released in its entirety on an album, as the film (at that time) could never be shown in reruns on network television. It contains the vocals of the four actors performing in the film with the only piece of music heard throughout the entire album is a song titled "Virginia Woolf Rock" that plays while Martha and Nick are dancing (but plays a little differently than it does in the film).

In at least two instances alternate takes were used: Taylor's memorable "Goddamn you!" line is altered to "Screw you!", and some of the dialogue from the dancing sequence was lifted from another take. As Martha tells her story about punching George in the stomach in front of her father to Nick and Honey, it is heard very clearly while in the film it became distant and muffled as the camera followed George into another room to get a gun. The album also ran a half-hour shorter than the movie as most pauses and long silent moments were removed. However, virtually every line remains intact. The album's cover has the four main actors on the cover and the back cover has some background information about the four actors, information about the five month shooting schedule, some information about Albee and a brief synopsis of the film. This album is also out-of-print, was never re-released in any other formats and is also highly prized among collectors.

The music from the film was bootlegged unofficially onto an undated German CD that featured 11 tracks of film composer Alex North's score from the film (other music releases from the film used conductor Jerry Goldsmith's music, which also added snippets of dialog on a couple tracks, especially Elizabeth Taylor shouting "SNAP!").

External links

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Internet Broadway Database
• Guardian review of London production 01/02/2006
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? literary analysis, themes, quotes, teaching guide