What first involves thoughts once you consider “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
To Philip Gefter, it’s not the game-changing play by Edward Albee, however Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton within the film, as Gefter makes clear in “Cocktails with George and Martha: Films, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “(Bloomsbury, 359 pages), which devotes ten of its 13 chapters to the making of the film, and solely the primary three to the playwright and the play.
These three chapters are wealthy sufficient intimately, and revelation – or at the least hypothesis — to intrigue most theater lovers.
Nonetheless, the film is clearly the creator’s major curiosity, and body of reference. It will be arduous to argue that isn’t the neatest (which is to say, most business) focus: Glamorous film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, essentially the most well-known married couple on this planet in 1966 — a headline-grabbing union born in scandal — making a film collectively about married couple George and Martha, whose foul-mouthed, abusive conduct scandalizes not simply their younger married friends Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) late one night time, however rapt film audiences all through the nation.
Gefter makes the case for the film’s influence, affect and significance from the very first phrases in his ebook: “What a dump!” He spends the primary six pages in a prologue explaining how the phrase turned well-known not as a result of Bette Davis uttered it in “Past the Forest,” a 1949 “noir flop,” however as a result of Elizabeth Taylor repeats it because the character Martha recalling the previous film line, within the opening scene of the 1966 film. “This was one small testomony to the influence of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It might remodel even this intentionally misremembered snippet, plucked from the wastebin of American cultural oblivion, right into a shibboleth of subtle style.”
The film, he factors out, earned “piles of cash and a raft of prizes,” and marked “the dying of the Manufacturing Code, Hollywood’s midcentury censorship regime.” It additionally “is my customary in opposition to which all films about marriage are measured, however clearly not as a result of George and Martha’s marriage is right” – which he demonstrates with an intensive “epilogue” inserting the film (not the play) within the context of different films (not theater) about marriage, lots of which he argues had been influenced by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It’s inadvertently telling that many of the films he describes had been diversifications of novels and performs.
One yearns for a much less ardent perspective on the film, which one will get, briefly, from an unimpeachable supply, Edward Albee: “Finally, it’s not dangerous. The one bother with it’s that it’s fully humorless.” He additionally didn’t perceive why they shot the film in black and white. “I wrote the play in colour.”
Albee comes off as a colourful character himself within the early chapters, a delicate turned rebellious little one adopted right into a wealthy chilly household who escapes as a youngster to Greenwich Village, entranced by the bohemian tradition. By age 24 he was residing within the Village with a boyfriend and mentor, composer William Flanagan, 5 years his senior, socializing with playwrights, poets and composers of some renown and hanging out in native cafes and homosexual bars, the place at 26, he noticed a bit of graffiti on a mirror that caught with him: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Albee wrote his first one-act play in 1958, one month shy of his thirtieth birthday. It was “The Zoo Story,” and it launched his profession as a playwright. In 1960, he began engaged on his first full-length play, ultimately giving it the title from the graffiti he had seen six years earlier. By then, he had a brand new boyfriend, Terrence McNally, ten years his junior, who would develop into a much-respected playwright in his personal proper.
Gefter is sweet in explaining the inspirations and connections that led to Albee’s preliminary playwriting profession, a lot of the data coming from Mel Gussow’s biography of Albee, and in chronicling the sophisticated story of the event and first manufacturing of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Of explicit fascination is the origin of that play; Gefter speculates that it was formed partially by his relationships with Flanagan and McNally, however most straight modeled after a pair he knew via his affiliation with Wagner School in Staten Island. Willard Maas, a poet and experimental filmmaker, taught within the English division; his spouse, Marie Menken, was a painter and filmmaker. The couple had been evidently so infamous for his or her weekend binge-drinking and bickering that they had been the topic of an early documentary movie by Andy Warhol.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” starring Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. If preliminary critiques had been blended, the viewers response was thunderous. The play’s director Alan Schneider is quoted as explaining the draw:
“Individuals who wouldn’t come to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a play of concepts concerning the failure of American marriage, or a philosophical drama coping with the ambiguous battle between reality and phantasm, got here to see us as a result of they thought we had been a ‘soiled’ play or as a result of somebody advised them there have been attractive scenes—Uta Hagen touching the within of George Grizzard’s thigh.”
Gefter himself is extra reverent and methodical – downright sociological — in explaining its attraction, seeing it as “an era-defining play,” tapping into the until-then hidden cultural temper of the occasions: Martha’s discontent, for instance, was one thing that Betty Friedan would quickly write about in “The Female Mystique.”
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” paid its buyers again after solely thirty-one performances. It went on to win 5 Tony Awards, together with finest play — however not the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the Pulitzers gave no prize for drama that 12 months, a deliberate snub of Albee’s play, which the drama jurors had chosen, however which the board of trustees rejected as a result of, within the phrases of 1 naysayer, it was a “filthy play.”
All of this, as I say, is within the first three chapters. The remainder of “Cocktails with George and Martha” (such an unlucky title!) is taken up with the film, together with vivid portraits of all these concerned, resembling Ernest Lehman, a first-time producer who had been a revered screenwriter (Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the film diversifications of West Facet Story and The Sound of Music); Mike Nichols, a first-time director who had been a wildly profitable performer and Broadway director (as we realized from Mark Harris’s latest biography, from which Gefter judiciously culls), and naturally the 4 forged members. There are some scrumptious particulars: Elizabeth Taylor, then thirty two years previous and on the top of her magnificence and glamor, was desirous to stretch by taking part in an obese shrew of a middle-aged girl — however not aged 52, which was within the script; she’d solely go so far as 48. She stormed out when the director advised her to recite the strains precisely as they had been within the script, and didn’t come again till very late within the day – all cheerful, as a result of she had had a protracted lunch with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Gefter spends an inordinate time re-creating sure scenes second by second, relying explicitly on the journal stored by Lehman (and, implicitly, by watching the film again and again), and in recounting blow by blow the petty bickering between the producer and the director. The creator’s effort at evaluation, whereas often admirable, too usually will get misplaced in ethereal abstraction: Every time he makes use of the phrase “existential,” its which means turns into much less clear. (I additionally want he would search for the dictionary definition of “enormity.”)
However there are additionally many worthwhile glimpses into what it’s wish to adapt a play, and this play particularly – and the distinction between theatermaking and moviemaking. Though Elizabeth Taylor had made some three dozen films over the earlier twenty years, this was the primary time that any director had concerned her in two weeks of rehearsals with the remainder of the forged, starting with a desk learn. Nichols noticed his job as reversing all of the adjustments that Lehman’s screenplay had made to Albee’s script, which he managed to do. “My job is to not ‘repair’ what Albee wrote, however to disclose it.”
Associated
