GLR July-August 2024

lackluster member of the History Department, while George, catching Martha’s response to the handsome and athletic Nick, dares her to take it up a notch with him. Later, he goads Nick into telling an indiscretion about his far from perfect marriage with Honey. In Virginia Woolf , heterosexual marriage with all its petty savageries and hidden loyalties is placed on the operating table as in a surgical theater for the audience to witness and wince at. A stellar Broadway cast led by Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, with Melinda Dillon and George Grizzard as the

with the prospect of selling it to Jack Warner at Warner Broth ers Studios. Warner hired Lehman as producer and screenwriter. Albee was paid half a million dollars for the rights, plus ten per cent of any earnings above six million dollars. Warner informally agreed to Albee’s wish for Bette Davis and James Mason to play the leads. Lehman had other ideas, and while he had toyed with such possibilities as Ingrid Bergman, Anne Bancroft, and Geraldine Page, he grew excited at the prospect of Elizabeth Taylor in the role. From one vantage point, she was clearly wrong for the part: she was twenty years younger than Martha’s character. But after the worldwide scandal over her affair with Richard Burton during the filming of Cleopatra in Rome, she was arguably the most famous woman on the planet, and Lehman sensed that the audience would want to see how Taylor handled a role so un like anything she’d done before. When he fi nally consulted with Taylor, she cast aside her doubts and agreed to do it, but only if Burton played oppo site her as George. Once both Burtons were on board, Lehman turned his sights to naming the film’s director. Movie stalwarts and a few promi nent theater hands were in the mix, but the Burtons “insisted” that Broadway wunderkind Mike Nichols be considered. Back in 1960, Burton had appeared on Broadway in Camelot just when Nichols and his partner in social satire were starring in their hit show An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May .

younger pair, produced a blockbuster pro duction. Yet despite reviews that “ac knowledged the play’s significance” and a healthy box office, a backlash started to emerge. Gay novelist Christopher Bram explained that a “trickle of critical remarks became a mudslide, falling not just on Albee but on all gay playwrights.” Richard Schechner, founder of the experimental

In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , heterosexual marriage with all its pe tt y savageries and hidden loyal ti es is placed on the opera ti ng table.

Wooster Group, wrote: “I’m tired of morbidity and sexual per versity which are there only to titillate an impotent and ho mosexual theater and audience.” An essayist in The New York Times targeted two playwrights who “seem to be glorying viciously in their own contempt for others ... and their own self-oriented sickness.” Identifying Albee and Tennessee Williams, the writer wondered if the “waspish bitchiness of the dialogue in Virginia Woolf ... [corre sponded] to a recognizable pattern of speech in a marriage, or to some other relationship out and beyond the experience of most of us?” Albee wrote in a rebuttal in the Times titled “Who’s Afraid of the Truth?”: “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to, let us stop going to the theater entirely.” Gefter reports that there was “a lingering rumor perpetu ated mostly in the gay community that Virginia Woolf was a gay play in drag, that is, about two gay male couples.” Albee denied this rumor and always refused to allow any theater company to cast his play with male couples. Terrence Mc Nally, his friend and early lover, attributed Albee’s closeted ness to his fear “of being identified as a gay playwright.” Still, did Albee’s play drop no hairpins? Consider that Martha’s en trance with the Bette Davis line “What a dump!” is an ac knowledged reference to a camp icon. Less noticeable is George’s allusion to his imaginary son as “the little bugger.” Putting a reference to the British term “buggery” into George’s American mouth might seem a small thing, but do American fathers typically refer to their mischievous male tykes as “lit tle buggers”? § O NCE G EFTER SHIFTS to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ’s transi tion to film, the gay elements largely recede from view. In 1963, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and seasoned Hollywood veteran Ernest Lehman had received a copy of the play from his agent at William Morris, which was also Albee’s agency. Lehman found it too disturbing, declaring that he would never see the play. But he was “dragged” by his wife to its opening night in L.A. and “stumbled” out of the theater, concealing his sobs. Lehman’s agent enticed him to consider writing the screenplay

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