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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Edward Albee

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.

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.[1]

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play on the title of the once popular 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

The play premiered on February 15, 1939 at the National Theatre and ran for 410 performances. In addition to Bankhead as Regina Giddens, the opening night cast included Carl Benton Reid as Oscar, Charles Dingle as Benjamin, Frank Conroy as Horace, Patricia Collinge as Birdie, Dan Duryea as Leo, and Florence Williams as Alexandra. The production was produced and directed by Herman Shumlin. Eugenia Rawls replaced Williams later in the run.

Revivals

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 [2]

Evidence of the joke’s humor, or existence has yet to be obtained. 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 Custis Dandridge 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

George and Martha are a middle aged married couple, whose charged relationship is defined by vitriolic verbal battles, which underlies what seems like an emotional dependence upon each other. This verbal abuse is fueled by an excessive consumption of alcohol. George being an associate History professor in a New Carthage university where Martha’s father is the President adds an extra dimension to their relationship. Late one Sunday evening after a faculty mixer, Martha invites Nick and Honey, an ambitious young Biology professor new to the university and his mousy wife, over for a nightcap. As the evening progresses, Nick and Honey, plied with more alcohol, get caught up in George and Martha’s games of needing to hurt each other and everyone around them. The ultimate abuse comes in the form of talk of George and Martha’s unseen sixteen year old son, whose birthday is tomorrow.

Turning the underbelly of bourgeois academia into a microcosm of human relationships in all their arduous complexities, it’s a harrowing descent into the private lives and painful secrets of two couples thrown together for an evening. George is an associate professor of history who has turned to alcohol to deal with his vituperative, vicious wife Martha, whose appetite for administering abuse knows no bounds. The witty repartee of consummate sophisticate Martha degenerates into increasingly violent verbal abuse of both her husband and guests, while George’s stoic facade crumbles both physically and emotionally. The horrified Nick and Honey initially come off as happier foils to the misery of the older married couple, but the guests are soon mirroring George and Martha in their mutual antagonism, giving voice to buried resentments and alcohol-fueled revelations of repressed injuries.

Cast Lists

Opening Night Cast 2012 B’Way USA

Tracy Letts ….George

Amy Morton … Martha

Carrie Coon …Honey

Madison Dirks …Nick

Run

Video

Original Broadway Cast Recording

In 1963, Columbia Masterworks released a four-LP 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.

2004-2010 Production

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.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 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.

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

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.”[3]

References

1. Klein, Alvin. “Albee’s ‘Tiny Alice, The Whole Enchilada.” The New York Times 24 May 1998: CT11.

2. Flanagan, William (Fall 1966). “The Art of Theater No. Edward Albee” (PDF). The Paris Review 4 (39). Archived from the original on 2008-05-29. Retrieved 2008-06-17.

3. Jack Valenti. “How It All Began“. Motion Picture Association of America. Archived from the original on 2008-05-21. Retrieved 2008-06-17.

4. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Internet Broadway Database

5. Guardian review of London production 01/02/2006

6. London Theatre Guide (London 2005)

7. Anni Bruno (London 2005)

8. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? literary analysis, themes, quotes, teaching guide