Like meteors, they blaze across the stage. You know, the Great Ones: those once-in-a-blue-moon dramatic events that blast you between the eyes, create indelible sparks, and forever change the way you think about the world. Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", opening Saturday at Great Lakes Theater Festival, is undeniably one of them.
So how do you begin to talk about one of the most influential theater works of a generation?, I ask director Steven Woolf in a brief phone interview. "Other than 'a great play with a brilliant cast?'", he laughs. "Well...I think it's a love story."
A love story? In 1962 it was more like the equivalent of a 20-megaton hit -- one that rocked Broadway with explosions of language, passion, and controversy. Critics and audiences raved, or raged. The Pulitzer Committee was torn, and eventually denied Albee the Pulitzer Prize for what one of the trustees called a "filthy" play. The 1966 film by Mike Nichols created more indelible images when it was adapted for those showbiz icons of marital bloodsport, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. "Drop in for drinks with George and Martha", reads the library blurb for the video release. "Nothing fancy, just a freewheeling, headlong slide into the corrosive hell of a marriage twisted by years of hatred and humiliation."
Oooh -- does this sound like a good time? Readers, here's my midnight confession: it is. On the stage, Albee's drama is wicked, wicked fun, part roller coaster, part laugh-in-the-dark ride. It's an expose' of relationships as performance art: a twisted yet antic trip in the most intimate heart of a 23-year marriage and its secret compromises, where the partners know each other so well they can push every button and still manage to play to the gallery.
And oh, can they play. Even audiences who have become inured to the foul-mouthed fighting couples of the Jerry Springer Show will still gasp at Albee's needle-sharp game players. So just imagine how they came across in the cloistered post-Ike world of 1962, a time where ladies still wore hats and gloves downtown. In what you'd expect to be the ultimate fortress of gentility -- a professorial living room in a liberal arts college town -- the playwright plants a swaggering time-bomb: the horny, boozing Martha and the beleaguered, acid-tongued George, ready to torment a younger academic couple with late-night mind games like "Hump the Hostess" and "Get the Guests". As they match wits and scrape their illusions down to raw bone, you can feel a new dawn in American drama.
Albee's savage-comic truth-telling put its searing stamp on many artists: you can feel the influence of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" on a host of contemporary playwrights, from Mart Crowley to Nicky Silver. More than once I have wondered whether I'd have ended up in theatre myself if I hadn't discovered it as a teenager. I can remember the way its sheer audacity lit up a particular space behind my eyeballs, how it made me feel like I was overhearing secret truths about life. I read a copy 'til it was dog-eared, borrowed the precious cast album from the library and played it over and over on my best friend's record player. (Of course I couldn't bring it home: I was afraid my parents would go ballistic at the language.)
Whether you believe the play is about the pitiless destruction of a lie -- or, like Woolf, how a marriage is saved at the quiet dawning of a new light -- there's no denying its incredible power. It also bestowed upon Albee a dark gift: overnight, at 34, he became a crown prince of serious theatre, that thing of promise and peril, a Great American Playwright.
Now, 36 years and three awarded Pulitzers later, his career a furious roller coaster of its own, Albee has made his own way, and, with "Three Tall Women", recently reclaimed his place in the pantheon. But my peers and I can still moan and sigh with envy when we realize -- ah, impossible! -- that the amazing "...Virginia Woolf" was his first full-length play.
[Great Lakes Theater Festival presents "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", a play by Edward Albee. Opening May 9 at the Ohio Theatre, Playhouse Square Center, Cleveland. Call 241-6000 for reservations and tickets.]
Originally published in the Plain Dealer, April 1998.
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