Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Over the past few years Edward Albee, now 34, built up a considerable reputation off-Broadway and abroad on the basis of four one-act plays. The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream did, in truth, indicate a minor if nonetheless indisputable talent.

When word came that Albee was readying a big play for Broadway, the ticking of the deathwatch could at once be heard all the way to the village. But Albee has fooled the prophets of doom with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his first full-evening play (I do not invoke the much-used term 'full-length, for any work of art that is as long as it ought to be is full-length), and done it with a vengeance: Virginia Woolf comprises three acts each about an hour long.

One comes out of the theatre crushed and enervated. And this is what Albee wants. He has set his play in the New England college town of New Carthage; and he proceeds to carry out the ancient Cato's oft-repeated exhortation, "Delendaest Carthago." In this he is helped by what seems to him to be a sterile modern society marked, among other things, by sadism and a death-wish. Whether one shares this view, he puts it cogently.

There hover over the play the tutelary figures of Strindberg, Hellman, the late O'Neill (especially Long Day's Journey Into Night), and the Sartre of No Exit. And why not? Albee was out to create a major work, and he might as well vie with the best. He has, in fact, come up with far and away the most impressive new American play to reach Broadway since Miss Hellman's Toys in the Attic three years ago.

With a bow to the classical unities, the entire action of Virginia Woolf takes place in a faculty couple's living room and runs continuously from 2 a.m. until dawn on a Sunday. (Someone must already have dubbed the play Long Night's Journey Into Day.) And with a bow to intellectualism, Albee has subtitled the three acts "Fun and Games," "Walpurgisnacht," and "The Exorcism."

At rise of curtain, George and hid wife Martha (played by Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen) are just getting home from a faculty party at the president's home. He is in his middle forties, an associate professor of history; she, six years older, is the prexy's daughter. She has invited a new young couple over for a nightcap; and while waiting for the guests to arrive, there is some joking and joshing. But as the youngsters enter, they hear a wrought-up Martha hurl "Screw you!" across the room at her husband. Nick (George Grizzard), aged 30, is a new member of the biology department; his wife Honey (Melinda Dillon) is four years younger. At first they are onlookers, but before long they find themselves sucked into the vortex of a maelstrom. The fun refuses to remain innocent, and the games become deadly: in turn they play Humiliate the Host, then Hump the process more liquor than does the entire assemblage at the "Libiamo" party in La Traviata.

Friction leads to abrasion, contusion to concussion, laceration to impalement, dismemberment to disembowelment. We are witness to animals in an arena; and we watch the performance of picadors, banderilleros, and matadors, complete with a climactic, mortal moment-of-truth. The play is, in fact, perhaps best analyzed in terms of the bullfight. I shall spare you this, however, and simply remark that Albee has failed to give his play the aesthetic and artistic from of the bullfight.

Albee's chief trouble lies in the third act, as Walter Kerr of the Herald-Tribune and Howard Taubman of the Times stated--but not for their reason. To be sure, Albee did introduce here a certain dramatic device. Critical ethics prevent me from joining Kerr and Taubman in revealing it specifically. I shall only say that the neo-naturalistic style of the first two acts turns somewhat Pirandellian in the third, which treats the theme so eloquently examined in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.

But the device is not inherently invalid and unbelievable, as the critics maintained. The falling-off in the third act cannot be laid to one gimmick. No; it is more generalized than that. What Albee failed to do was to keep up the drive and level of writing achieved in the first two acts. Let no-one think that Act III is weak by itself; it simply pales after the two hours of extraordinarily sustained energy that precede it.

There are a few other blemishes, mostly in the matter of judgement. The extended burlesque of Bette Davis at the start of the play and the later use of a toy popgun are both funny of themselves, but they cheapen the play unnecessarily. When one is trying to operate at a high level, one ought to deny himself--no matter how reluctantly--even the best of a low level. Not that I would proscribe all comedy in this play; there is much, and most of it is appropriate. And while I should not temper one bit the venom and vitriol and vulgarity of Albee's dialogue, I do think the play would benefit from less profanity.

The only compromise Albee allowed--and an unimportant one--concerns the tune to which the play's title is intermittently sung as a refrain. It was intended to use "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's movie of The Three little Pigs. But since this song is still copyrighted and would have to be paid for week, the expense was avoided by using instead the folksong "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush", which is in the public domain.

The two married couples constitute the entire cast. But, unlike No Exit, the main characters are not present on stage all the time. Albee has shown great skill here in the way he gets his people in and out of the room; one feels that they come and go because they need to, not because they are made to--no mean feat in the theatre.

People rhapsodize about the foursome assembled to play the leading roles in the stage and film versions of Long Day's Journey; but there was a weak sister--or, I should say, brother--in the cast of the former, and a weak mother and brother in the latter. Virginia Woolf, however, currently boasts a quartet that is utterly flawless; and their performance (under Alan Schneider's inspiring career as the history professor who, once thought direction), individually and corporately, is bound to be talked about for decades.

Arthur Hill gives the crowning portrayal of his to be presidential timber, couldn't even become department chairman. He is as impressive in what he holds back as in what he gives. The role, like that of Othello, needs careful control, and the player must not let go full steam too soon. Hill is wonderful at conveying the pent-up pressure that finally bursts forth into "total war."

Uta Hagen, a superb actress who has in the past not fared so well as she deserved, tears with relish into the juicy role of the earthy, vulgar, oversexed wife once driven to make incestuous advances to her son. It is a part of enormous advances to her son. It is a part of enormous range, and Miss Hagen is into every nuance of it. (Reportedly, Margaret Leighton was first choice for the part; fine as she is, she would not have been right for it.)

The role of the opportunistic biologist is the easiest and least rounded of the four. But George Grizzard fills it out with admirable skill. Melinda Dillon, an actress new to me, is truly remarkable as the ridiculously tiddly young wife of weak stomach and low I.Q. This is a treacherous part that would be unbearably painful in the hands of a lesser actress.

Nevertheless, in the cold glance of retrospect, one cannot escape the conclusion that, when the four characters have been laid bare to the innards, they are all nullities in essence. The play is about four nobodies; and this too keeps it from reaching the plateau of O'Neill, for one. Month after month of theatrical mediocrity may be the reason that one critic hailed Albee as "a major dramatist, quite possibly the most important playwright since O'Neill, whom he resembles and, in some respects, betters." O'Neill is not that easily surpassed--but this is not the place to dispose of the current cliche that O'Neill's command of the English language was inadequate.

Still, make no mistake: Virginia Woolf is a monumental achievement against any standards. And in terms of Albee's own development, it represents a gigantic stride forward. This work is Albee's Eroica Symphony (the finale of Beethoven's is a similar letdown). In our own time, this blockbuster of a stage quartet will likely turn out to be to the drama of the 1960's what Elliott Carter's behemoth of a string quartet was to the music of the 1950's.

A final note of caution: the four players mentioned above perform only in the evening. The excessive demands of the roles make it folly to attempt more than one performance a day (Salvini, remember, refused to play Othello more than four times a week). The matinee performances, therefore, offer a completely different cast; and there seems general agreement that only Kate Reid's Martha can stand up alongside the evening counterpart.