This entire presentation is copyright © 1968 and © 1999 by William Allin Storrer. Phd. For permission to quote, contact Dr. Storrer at mindalive@storrer.com
<The overlap of truth and illusion is central, giving the work a universality that carries it beyond Albee's evident preoccupation with the state of society as he sees it in the USA. Certainly he tends to pin it down a bit by naming his principal figures George and Martha, after the Washingtons . . . . That these flaws are not strictly indigenous to the USA is proved surely by the recognition of Albee's work internationally.>
---Gordon Gow in Films and Filming1
Albee's preoccupation with the state of society in the U.S.A. may be evident to Gordon Gow, even though Richard Burton aids Cinewoolf's more universal statement "by eschewing an American accent."2 The theme must be given its specific statement before it can be opened to universal application, and the grounding of the extension of the truth and illusion theme into a statement about the condition of current society rests on the acceptance of Martha and George as in some manner symbolic of Martha and George Washington.
Once the implication that Martha and George represent more than a small college campus couple is implanted in the minds of the audience, by whatever means, it can lead to a questioning that has the possibility of total revelation or the social statement. In Cinewoolf the initial implications are present, but the total social statement has been emasculated so that the implications or Cinewoolf lead either to wild speculations or perhaps a general indictment of humanity, rather than the specific indictment of America and the west that is rendered in Stagwoolf.
Martha and George remain Martha and George, and it is possible that an audience will connect these names with the first family of the United States. It is also possible that they will connect the name Nick with Nikita Kruschev. Once having been introduced to this possibility, will the audience note any supporting evidence to reinforce the possibility of political allegory?
The "Albee family America" of Lee Baxandall3 is still present, as described in Chapter V. The patriarch, Martha's father, is still talked about and still remains off stage. Martha and George still are representative of the Now generation, and Nick and Honey represent the Nowhere generation. The changed age of the son, from twenty-one to sixteen,(44) presents a problem. As twenty-one in Stagwoolf, the son was only five years younger than Honey, and could easily be considered part of her, and Nick's, generation. At sixteen, he is still a teen-ager, and hardly of the adult generation represented by Nick and Honey. This connection, with its overtones of imaginary American dream son contrasted to the IBM male Nick, is lost from Cinewoolf.
If a Stagwoolf script is corrected to read as the Cinewoolf dialogue script by penciling or inking in the corrections and changes noted in Appendix A, the largest excisions will fall into but a few categories. The most obvious cut is all of pages 160-173, which is a major factor in the change of tragic focus from Stagwoolf to Cinewoolf. Other major cuts involve Martha's past history and relationship with her father and George's dialogue with Nick over Nick's scientific future. It is this last category that reflects most directly on the question of this chapter.
Nick is still clearly identified as a biologist, putting him in the forefront of modern-day scientific research, but what he intends to do as a biologist is largely excised. It is established that he is "going to make all that trouble . . . making everyone the same, rearranging the chromozones, or whatever it is."(37) When further specifics of this are mentioned in Stagwoolf, they are usually excised from Cinewoolf. The following lines are among the most significant of what is missing from the film: "You people are going to make them in test tubes, aren't you? You biologists. Babies."(40) "This young man is working on a system whereby chromosomes can be altered . . . well not all by himself--he probably has one or two co-conspirators,"(65) "We will have a race of men . . . test-tube bred . . . incubator-born . . . superb and sublime."(65) "A certain number of sperm tubes will have to be cut,"(66) "Millions of tiny little slicing operations."(66) "A race of scientists and mathematicians, each dedicated to and working for the greater glory of the supercivilization."(66)
All these quotes identify Nick as a member of the scientific elite who are going to bring down the world as George knows it, and Russian education is popularly known for turning out the technologists and engineers needed to change the face of the land. Nick and George are pitted as the symbolic leaders of Russia and America in the following lines excised from Cinewoolf: "You men solve the problems of the world, as usual?"(48) George's "I will not give up Berlin!"(67) and "with my free hand I will battle you to the death" to which Nick replies, "That's right. And I am going to be the wave of the future."(68)
The long cut from page 77 to 81 is mostly Martha's history, but brings up the fact that George was to be the continuation of what Daddy had founded. As noted in Chapter V, Albee's symbolism is not perfectly consistent. In this instance, Daddy stands for the pioneer spirit which George has not continued.
George also loses to excision in transfer from Stagwoolf to Cinewoolf his lack of surety about "national boundaries, the level of the ocean, political allegiances, practical morality,"(72) his fear of survival,(106) and his fascination with "the pragmatic accommodation by which you wave-of-the-future boys are going to take over."(107) George is still presented as one who has taken "the trouble to construct a civilization . . . to . . . to build a society, based on the principles . . . principle."(117)
Nick remains allied to the church represented by Honey, though much of the detail on this has been cut.(106-111) George's suggestion that Nick rearrange his alliances(149) is kept in its general form, but when George makes the offer specific, "Why don't you come on over to our side," where they can "blow the hell out of" "China, Manchuria . . . those yellow bastards,"(166) it does not appear in Cinewoolf.
This latter cut is from the long section cut to accommodate Cinewoolf to Martha, eliminating what would be George's major on stage sparagmos. This cut produces another loss to the total statement the playwright is making about American and/or western civilization, for the last lines to be included in the cut are: "And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must . . . eventually . . . fall."(174)
In Chapter V it was noted that the attachment of doom to America depended on the identification or the campus as a "New Carthage." This reference to New Carthage is made by George once in an offhand manner(40) but is thereafter cut.(104,110,114,135)
Certainly the hint of Cinewoolf operating on a symbolic level is present in what remains. All the hints are mentioned once; rearranging chromosomes, New Carthage, constructing a civilization, but rarely twice. Two major specific statements related to this theme were inevitably cut when pages 160-174 and adjacent material was cut. The relationship of these two cuts to the other cuts will be considered in greater detail in Chapter XI.
One may get the suggestion of this level of symbolism from the dialogue that remains in Cinewoolf, but the film never goes further to make the suggestion explicit in terms of dialogue. Obvious means of making this explicit in terms of the content of the frame also seem to have been avoided. As the camera moves through the house or the town, nowhere does it show the trappings of the American revolutionary past that were present in the New York production, as described in Chapter II Production Designer Richard Sylbert
<. . . visited 18 college campuses and faculty members' homes to absorb their atmosphere so that he might design authentically the home of George and Martha and install the visible marks of their long residence there.>4
His concern thus seems to be on Martha and George as college types, not as symbols, and thus the frame does not reveal hints of the symbolic content of Albee's work.
Since the references that point to this symbolic level of interpretation are so few, opportunities for reinforcement in terms of rhythmic montage or other visual techniques are equally scarce, and there is no apparent reinforcement of this symbolism at this level.
One factor that may work to support the symbolism is the same factor that applied in Chapter IX. By not visualizing what is suggested, by not making it concrete in visual terms, it is called to our attention. But then it is called to our attention as not concrete, since the film has failed to make it that. The principle would then tend to work against any suggestion of a symbolic meaning in the names of Martha, George and Nick, and in their being at New Carthage. It is not just that Nick does not in any way look like a young Kruschev, nor Martha and George like middle-aged Washingtons, but that no other visual references come to attention that give even the slightest support to such a suggestion.
In Cinewoolf, the symbolism of the decline of the west must be considered to be at best hinted at, but hardly justified in the concrete terms available to the cinema.
1. Gordon Gow, "Who' s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Films and Filming, XII (September, 1966), p. 6.
2. Ibid.
3. Lee Baxandall, "The Theatre of Edward Albee," Tulane Drama Review, IX (Summer, 1965), pp. 19-40.
4. Herb A. Lightman, "The Dramatic Photography of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'," The American Cinematographer, XLIV (August, 1966), p. 532.