GLR July-August 2024

ESSAY

The Double Life of Albee’s Woolf A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

C OCKTAILS with George and Martha is a cul tural history that captures the moment when Broadway drama received a jolt from the The ater of the Absurd. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , which opened on Broadway in October 1962, jumps off from the Bohemian precincts of New York City—especially Greenwich Village and Off-Broadway, where Albee’s first one-act play, The Zoo Story , had its American premiere at the Provincetown Playhouse after an unlikely world premiere in Berlin. While Albee’s early career is not a gay Bildungsroman, the first sec tions of Gefter’s account vividly establish the tenor of condemnation and shame visited upon gay people in the pre- Stonewall period. We get a brisk but incisive portrait of the home

ing mother argued frequently, encouraging his truculent be havior. His father gave him an ultimatum to “either straighten up or get out.” Albee packed a single suitcase, and, at age nine teen, fled the chilly confines of his parents’ home. The year was 1947. Abandoning the bourgeois comforts and bigotries of the family hearth for the adventures of downtown Manhattan, Albee fell in with a heterodox community of “composers, writers, and poets who personified not only the disaffected artist but, equally, the stigmatized urban queer.” His first adventures led to a

strained romance with William Flanagan, a composer and music critic, and later to a re lationship with a recent Columbia Uni

versity graduate and theater enthusiast, Terrence McNally, who would go on to become a major playwright of the gay zeitgeist. Albee became well connected in downtown art and intellectual cir cles. Richard Barr, a successful independent producer, took on the New York staging of TheZoo Story in 1960 and soon sought fi nancial backing for another Albee work from a fellow gay Princeton ian, Clinton Wilder. Albee was lucky in these alliances, as Barr and Wilder would later form their own production company, which would partner with Albee for decades. At an early reading of the Vir ginia Woolf script in Barr’s apart ment, Barr grew concerned over

life endured by young Albee, the adopted son of wealthy but emotion ally withholding parents whom he fic tionalized in his second one-act play, The American Dream , described by one critic as “a couple who once adopted a son, whom they crippled with psychological torture of a classic Freudian kind.” Albee was sent off to a series of high end boarding schools and man aged to get thrown out of most of them. Following his expul sion from Valley Forge Military Academy, his im perious and socially am bitious mother had him enrolled in the high-toned Choate, where he “thrived aca demically.” Yet after admission to Trinity College, he “once again ... grew restless and bored,” and flunked out. To avoid the draft, he tried joining the Army Reserve. Con fronted with the question of whether he was homosexual, he admit

some of its rough language, especially since they planned to mount the play on Broadway. Still, he “hoped to take at least one ‘fuck’ uptown,” and Albee worked on revising the script. The central characters are George and Martha, a long-married couple on a New England col

ted that he was, and was rejected for service. At home, his Army rejection was never discussed, as talk of both feelings and sexuality was avoided, though Albee’s mother Frankie let loose occasional “denunciations about homosexuality [that] were always pointed and emphatic.” Albee and his domineer Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021).

lege campus whose wounded love and verbal sparring, both witty and cruel, are played out in their home, late at night, in front of Nick and Honey, a young couple new to the college whom George has invited over after a faculty party. A secret re sides at the heart of George and Martha’s childless marriage: a “son” that they refer to privately but have agreed never to men tion in the presence of company. As the night extends into dawn, Martha, daughter of the college president, taunts George as a

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