Book Review: Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(Received as a birthday present): My parents must have sensed something was up when I started quoting Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at age 12. Edward Albee's scathing portrayal of a sadomasochistic marriage always intrigued me. I first saw the movie on TV and even with network edits, it was so powerful. Then I viewed the film on the big screen in college and was overwhelmed. This is probably Elizabeth Taylor's best performance and Richard Burton's too. Philip Gefter entertainingly exposes the struggles to get this explosive property on film, and the backstage conflicts, principally between producer Ernest Lehman and first-time director Mike Nichols. Gefter traces the origins of the play and the bohemian gay circles Albee inhabited. The impact of Virginia Woolf on popular culture is seismic as it tore off the facade of polite depictions of American marriage and showed the raging emotions underneath.

The film version effectively ended studio censorship and ushered in the ratings system so film language was no longer so restricted.

Of course, the meat of the book is the day-to-day travails of filming which were mainly a power struggle between Nichols and Lehman. The Burtons did not make things any easier. Their contracts stipulated they would not work before 10am and at 6 pm sharp, an assistant would show up on set with a Bloody Mary for each of them signaling they were through for the day. It's that kind of detail that makes the book fun to read. 

2019-20 Broadway Season Forecast

July is here and that means the 2018-19 Broadway season is officially done with and the next one is underway. Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, the revival of Terrence McNally's 1988 two-hander, was the first official production of the season, opening in May. The summer is pretty slow this year with only two Broadway openings confirmed--Moulin Rouge, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann's gaudy and superficial 2001 film musical and Sea Wall/A Life, a transfer of a pair of solo pieces starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge which played the Public Theater earlier this year. Tea at Five, the one-woman play starring Faye Dunaway as Katharine Hepburn, was supposed to open sometime during the summer, as was an all-female staging of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. But neither ever secured a theater and their future is uncertain. Tea at Five is now playing Boston's Huntington Theater through July 14.

Here's a rundown of announced Broadway openings for 2019-20:

Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, and Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal.
Credit: Marc Brenner

Betrayal: Harold Pinter's reverse-chronicle triangle drama returns to Broadway for its third revival with Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox making their Broadway debuts after a smashing success in London's West End. (Original: 1980 with Raul Julia, Blythe Danner, and Roy Scheider, Reprised in 2001 with Liev Schreiber, Juliette Binoche and John Slattery, and in 2013 with Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall). (Jacobs/Sept. 15)

Derren Brown: Secret--The magician and mentalist brings his Drama Desk winning show to Broadway after a run at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2017.

The Height of the Storm--Manhattan Theater Club opens its Broadway season with this drama by French playwright Florian Zeller starring Eileen Atkins and Jonathan Pryce repeating their London performances as a couple who, not unlike the protagonists of Zeller's plays The Father and The Mother, face uncertainty and despair after decades of marriage.

B'way Update: Logjam in Spring 2018; Early 2018-19 Announcements

Jim Parsons will star in a revival of The Boys in the Band,
which will be eligible for 2018-19 Tonys.

So many Broadway theaters are booked and so few shows are closing there is a logjam of venues this spring. Therefore many shows have announced their openings for the next fall. Usually a number of productions shutter right after the holiday season, but in addition to the perennials like Wicked, Lion King, and Chicago, a number of productions which received middling reviews but strong word of mouth are still going into 2018 including Anastasia, A Bronx Tale and School of Rock, as well as Tony winners Dear Evan Hansen, Come from Away, and Kinky Boots. Tracey Letts' The Minutes has an announced opening of March 8,

Glenda Jackson will return to Broadway
after a 30-year absence in Three Tall Women.

but no theater yet. They'd better hurry and grab one. The all-star revival of The Boys in the Band with Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, and Andrew Rannells had originally been slated as an April opening in order to qualify for the Tonys, but it's just been announced as opening on May 31, meaning it will eligible for the 2019 awards. The shift may have been due to director Joe Mantello's heavy workload. He will also be staging the revival of Three Tall Women starring Glenda Jackson in her first Broadway role in 30 years (the Scottish play with Christopher Plummer in 1988 was her last) which opens just two months earlier on March 29. Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill are the other two women. 

Additional shows making early announcements for 2018-19 include To Kill a Mockingbird, Getting the Band Back Together, King Kong, The Prom, Pretty Woman, a Kiss Me, Kate revival from Roundabout starring Kelli O'Hara, and the Cher Show. Cher is not the only pop artist to have a musical based on her life and/or work in the planning stages. Others include Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (which has booked the Lunt-Fontanne for this April according to Michael Riedel of the NY Post), Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, Mighty Real: A Fabulous Sylvester Musical, Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morrisette), and a Pat Benatar musical. 

Who's Afraid of Virginia State?

The 2016 Presidential Debates will resemble
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The moderators for the 2016 presidential debates have been announced and a startling image came into my mind. The second debate will be co-hosted by CNN's Anderson Cooper and ABC's Martha Raddatz. This will be the first time both the debaters and the moderators will be opposite-sex pairs. It made me think of the event as a horrible nightmare version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, two drunken couples clashing in an all-night boozefest. Here's my version of the debate:

Who's Afraid of Virginia State (with apologies to Edward Albee)
Hillary Clinton as Martha
Donald Trump as George
Anderson Cooper as Nick
Martha Raddatz as Honey

The scene: a living room in Washington DC, late at night. The set is in darkness. We hear loud voices arguing offstage. The door opens, Hillary and Donald enter, returning from a late-night party.

Hillary: What a dump!...What's that from?
Donald: How the hell should I know?
Hillary: It's from some damn movie. Some damn Warner Brothers epic.
Donald: Ah ha! Your memory is failing. Just like I've been saying. Your health is terrible. You're falling apart. You don't have the stamina to be president.
Hillary: Listen, baby, I can drink you under any goddamn table you want and don't you forget it. You're the one who's in terrible shape in spite of what that crazy doctor of yours says. Now fix me a drink, lover.

2014-15 Broadway/Off-B'way Season Update

Glenn Close will star in
Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance this fall

Theater awards for 2013-14 are pouring in and so are announcements of new shows for 2014-15. In addition to This Is Our Youth with Michael Cera and Kieran Culken, there are several revivals of plays of which I have strong memories. It's Only a Play is Terrence McNally's inside-baseball comedy set on the opening night of a huge flop. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will reunite as a bitter actor and nervous playwright. I saw an earlier version of it called Broadway, Broadway during its out-of-town try-out in Philadelphia just before I went away to college in 1977. It starred James Coco and Geraldine Page, and closed out of town. I do remember one joke about Beatrice Straight doing a cabaret act. It resurfaced as It's Only a Play Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1986, again with Coco and Christine Baranski, Joanna Gleason and Mark Blum.

Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance is also coming back, this time with Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Lindsay Duncan and Martha Plimpton, directed by Pam McKinnon who staged Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for Steppenwolf and on Broadway. When I was in college in Pittsburgh, there were two simultaneous productions by different groups. I must be getting old because the 1996 revival seems like only a few months ago to me.

Changes in Broadway Revivals Lessen the Drama

Carrie Coon, Tracey Letts, Amy Morton, and Madison Dirks
in the current B'way revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Credit: Michael Brosliow 

Two major Broadway revivals have slight alterations in their scripts which result in softening their more ferocious characters and lessening the impact of the productions. In Pam McKinnon's staging of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, there is the fairly expected cut in the second act. The lights go down after Martha and Nick go off to the kitchen to copulate, leavening an enraged George, Martha's husband, to declare, "I'm going to get you for this, Martha." In the 1962 original, there is an additional scene between George and Honey, Nick's drunken wife, in which reveals-- SPOILER ALERT--he plans to kill off his and Martha's imaginary son (Hope I'm not ruining anything, but the play is 50 years old and you should know this by now.)   It's understandable, Virginia Woolf is VERY long and the cut scene doesn't significantly add to our understanding of the characters; Honey does get a bit more stage time, but that's the scene's biggest plus. This cut obviously has Edward Albee's approval and was used in the 2005 revival with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner.

The really significant change comes earlier in the second act when Martha humiliates George in front of their guests by repeating her father's long-ago threat to fire George from the university if he publishes a potentially scandalous novel about a young man who accidentally kills his parents.In the original and the 1966 movie version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Martha's coup de grace is to reveal that her husband told his father-in-law the novel is autobiographical, thus exposing the truth about a similar story George has earlier told Nick in private. In this new revival, Albee has rewritten this sequence to make Martha explicitly angry with George for caving in to her father and burning the manuscript. "Coward," she screams at her husband. This change makes Martha more conventionally sympathetic--she's not out to just embarrass George, she's furious that he's so weak-willed and furious with herself for loving him. I think this change weakens the play somewhat because I don't think Martha would be so self-aware at this point in the action. The war between George and Martha is at its midway point and Martha has not yet hit rock bottom in her self-realization (that comes in the third act). Now it's too early for that and the battle is less intense as a result. This is still a powerful production, but I prefer the original dialogue in this section.

Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale in Glengarry Glen Ross
Credit: Scott Landis

In the just opened Glengarry Glen Ross, director Daniel Sullivan and star Al Pacino have shifted the focus to Shelley Levine, the broken down salesman played by Robert Prosky (original Broadway production), Jack Lemmon (movie version), and Alan Alda (2005 revival). Here's a link to me review for ArtsinNY.com. Aside from Sullivan's staging which often places Pacino squarely center stage, I'm almost positive there have been subtle changes in the script. In the original, Levine mentions his daughter once in a bid for sympathy from the office manager Williamson. Here, she comes up a total of three times, thus giving Levine more of a family background and hopefully gaining more audience sympathy. In the original production, I recall a line that Ricky Roma (a slick Bobby Cannavale in this revival) delivers at the end of the play in which he demands a cut of all the office's sales. This has been cut, I guess to make Roma less of a shark and more human. Just as Martha is less of a ferocious fighter in the new production, Mamet's salesmen are not quite as predatory and dangerous.