Theater: Blood Sport

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, is a blood sport as well as a play. The weapons are words—vicious, cruel, unspeakably humiliating, unpredictably hilarious—the language of personal annihilation. Jabbing, slashing, eviscerating each other are a middle-aged history professor and his wife. “It is called love-hatred,” Strindberg once said, “and it hails from the pit.” Sharing this diabolic conversation pit are a younger faculty couple who start as passively trapped bystanders and finish as guilty fellow victims. In the long and lacerating annals of family fights on stage, there has been nothing quite like Virginia Woolf’s mortal battle of the sexes for sheer nonstop grim-gay savagery. The human heart is not on view, but the playgoer will know that he has seen human entrails.

Yet this play, with which Edward Albee, 34, has jolted the Broadway season to life, is not fundamentally about the war of the sexes. Its theme is sterility—actually in marriage, symbolically in modern U.S. life. The cue is scarcely necessary, but the action is set in the college town of New Carthage.

George, the history professor, and his wife Martha lead lives of noisy, clawing desperation. Martha is drunk, vituperative—she brays “Screw you” at George at the precise moment that the door opens on her guest couple, invited in at 2 a.m. for a nightcap after a faculty party. By rights, Nick, the young biology professor, and his wife Honey ought to squirm and leave, but Honey is a remarkably opaque ninny who promptly proceeds to get throwing-up drunk on brandy, and Nick proves to be made of sneakily ambitious stuff that will not permit him to turn his back on a hostess who happens also to be the daughter of the president of the college.

Witchily, Martha flays George. She wanted him to succeed her father; instead, he is the “bog in the history department.” Albee recognizes that the shape of a dream marks the personality after the dream’s defeat. Martha dreamed of power; defeated, she is loud, coarse, a monster of appetite, mostly promiscuous. George pursued the truth but has disenchantedly come to regard it as a mirage. In his dream’s defeat, he is a monster of intelligence, detached, acid, playful as a cobra, alternating easily from the deadly serious to the deadly comic.

After they play “Humiliate the Host,” George proposes other games, like “Get the Guests.” Nick gets Martha. George tries to goad Honey into listening to the lewd off-stage cavortings of their spouses, but she is locked in some private bomb shelter of her sodden fearful mind, and will not hear. At this point, the play achieves a suffocating vision of evil that would take a second Flood to cleanse. Even sin is sterile. Martha returns with a crestfallen Nick and announces mock-grandiosely: “I am the earth-mother, and you’re all flops.”

After that, the play is sapped by incredibility. Albee asks the playgoer to believe that the warring couple actually kept up a pretense about a nonexistent son for 21 years—having previously suggested various possible reasons for this neurotic myth, such as that Martha’s father didn’t like her. Coming after two acts of cascading turbulence, this plot resolution is woefully inadequate and incongruous, rather like tracing the source of Niagara to a water pistol. There are other weaknesses. The play is needlessly long (3¼ hours), repetitious, slavishly, sometimes superficially Freudian, and given to trite thoughts about scientific doom.

There is a frosty absence of compassion in Albee that is both a signature and a limitation on his talent. In Tennessee Williams, even the most grotesque character is touched with common humanity. Albee’s people are less odd, but more inhuman. To O’Neill, marriage had its serpents, but they were invaders in Eden. To Albee, marriage seems to be a no-exit hell in which the only intimacy is a hopeless common damnation. But a powerful play never founders on its flaws. Albee’s language is whiplash strong and leaves welts. His characters are rivetingly modern, and their weird autobiographical outbursts carry a numbing conviction.

The cast is shatteringly good. Uta Hagen fills Martha with pantherish ferocity and untamed vulgarity. In a skillfully modulated performance, Arthur Hill as George limns a memorable portrait of the sadist as A.B., M.A., Ph.D. George Grizzard makes Nick a moral chameleon with all the courage of his connections, and when Nature passed out brains, Melinda Dillon’s Honey was given cotton candy. The charged intensity that Director Alan Schneider brings to an evening full of talk is based on one penetrating insight—talk can kill, and murder is rarely a bore.

In the theater there are, ultimately, two kinds of drama, the quick and the dead. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? belongs articulately and terrifyingly among the quick.