Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf (dir. Mike Nichols, 1966). Introduced by Edward Albee.
Pace College, September 12, 2007.

Probably few plays more demand being filmed just as plays, if they are to be filmed at all, as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Only by constraining an ensemble of actors within the tight boundaries of a set and allowing them to react precisely, clearly, and a bit theatrically to each other can the play avoid sentiment and self-parody. In a recent documentary about Marie Mencken, Gerard Malanga describes the weekend binges/fights that she had with Willard Maas, the presumed models for Martha and George, as both ritualistic and directed to an audience and this theatrical stance is needed to allow the play to work. Freed from this kind of self-awareness, the play and its characters descend to the level of sloppy domestic soap opera.

Seeing the movie after a gap of many years, I was shocked at the extent it did descend into soap opera, in part because of self-indulgent acting, but more than anything because of Nichols’ adoption of a style that uses the camera to gratuitously move through the domestic space rather than simply and directly face them. As would be the case a couple of years later in The Graduate, the director’s seeming desire to be with-it seems to play the dominant role, the imperative to be cinematic overwhelming a very theatrical play and the demands it brings to the cinema. (A particularly example of Nichols need for hipness is the placing of the cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan on the wall of a bar which, though located in a college town, seems unlikely to have a juke box where Dylan would get much play.

Albee was quite (and I assume genuinely) gracious towards the film, criticizing only the use of music to sway audience attitudes and the temporary shift of the locale of the story to a bar as a violation of the play’s claustrophobia. He did mention, however, that he agreed to Jack Warner’s suggestion of a film version after being told that the lead roles would be played by James Mason and Bette Davis; just very the thought of Davis walking through the door and herself exclaiming “What a dump!” made the evening quite worthwhile. Tiny Alice, indeed. . .

(For a truly cinematic version of analogous material you probably couldn’t do better than Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass.)

Initial digression. . .

Today, for the first time in maybe a decade, I had a really excellent NYC espresso. Perfect crema, not bitter except for a slight aftertaste, and served for once in a proper china espresso cup. At La Colombe on Church Street and Lipensard.