This entire presentation is copyright © 1968 and © 1999 by William Allin Storrer. Phd. For permission to quote, contact Dr. Storrer at mindalive@storrer.com
Stagwoolf is set in "The living room of a house on the campus of a small New England College."1 This bit of information is often bypassed by the critic intent upon looking below the surface of a literary work in search of its "meaning," yet it stands out in Stagwoolf, and may point to one of the chief elements in the drama's success with a popular audience. All seven regular critics of the Now York daily newspapers mention some aspect of the campus oriented plots and one may easily compile a short outline of the play from their words.2
Without looking for hidden meanings, for symbolism or allegories, what is the simplest level of response to Albee's drama? Allen Lewis suggests the following:
<The plot, on the initial realistic level, is simple. George, associate professor of history, and Martha, his wife, daughter of the president of a small New England colleges return home early in the morning from a party given by her father for new faculty members. They are drunk when they enter and continue drinking throughout the rest of the play, which takes place in their living room, from two to five in the morning. They are joined by a young couple, the newly appointed teacher of biology and his wife. In the drunken orgy which follows, Martha and George engage in a harrowing battle to destroy one another, taking deliberate delight in pain and venom and cannibalism as they feed on each other's weaknesses.>3
This "initial realistic level" of perception is a direct level of response open to any viewer of the drama. Whatever differences may arise over the meaning of the drama, these facts stand out as incontrovertible. They are, for the most part, stated directly in the text and a director cannot, therefore, deny them in his production.
Perhaps this realistic level is but the specific framework that any drama requires, and is not meant to imply an actual situation any more than the plague of Oedipus Rex implies there ever was such a plague in the ancient city of Thebes. Is it significant that even a year before its production, Stagwoolf was identified as a drama "about faculty members and their wives"?4 Does the campus setting and plot affect one's response to the drama? This point will be considered later in this chapter after the factual elements of the play are documented.
One learns much about the present status of the characters as the drama is acted out on the stage, or as the text is read. The information that needs most to be documented is that information about the characters which is not necessarily demonstrated on stage, but which is told us by the characters, particularly as they speak about their lives prior to the beginning of the drama. It is also necessary to know as much about the world surrounding them as is available to the viewer or readers including directions concerning the stage setting. Martha is boisterous and vulgar on stage. What she has been like, and who she is, are also to be found in the text. Information about each of the four, about Daddy who remains off stage throughout, about the college and campus where they all now live, both in time and space, and about the house in which Martha and George live, is all pertinent in this consideration.
Martha, who has been married to George(32,54) for between twenty-two and twenty-three years,(54,153,156) is six years older than her spouse.(15,81) She is the daughter of the college president.(27) In her youth she went to a convent and later a college.(73) She had an earlier marriage, which lasted a week, to a lawns keeper. It was annulled, falsely since "you can't get an annulment if there's entrance."(78) She "was hostess for Daddy,"(78) the college president. Along came George, and she "fell for him."(81) During the wars she knocked George down boxing in a campus physical fitness kick.(56) Today, in the proper clothes, she looks "most voluptuous,"(47) smokes cigarettes,(50) "hasn't been sick a day in her life,"(89) has never been pregnant,(97) and admits to being both "loud" and "vulgar."(l57)
George has been married to Martha(32,54)5 for between twenty-two and twenty-three years,(54,153,156) and is "forty something"(35) years old, "six years younger than Martha.(15,81) He is an Associate Professor(85) in the History Department, which he ran "for four years, during the war."(38) It was during this time that Martha inadvertently knocked him down in a physical fitness boxing match.(56) He once tried to publish a book, but "Daddy wouldn't let him."(124) His "gray quality" suggests the fifties,(35) he does have a paunch, a "little distension just below the belt,"(35) and he is "going bald."(15) He also owns a gun that sprouts a "red and yellow Chinese parasol."(57)
"Daddy" is Martha's father and president of the University.(27) One can be sure of little else about him except that he went on a "physical fitness kick during the war,"(55) and stopped George from publishing his book.(124)
Nick is twenty-eight,(34) weighs about a hundred and fifty-five pounds,(54) and has a "firm body."(52) He played doctor with Honey when she was six,(104) and always expected to marry her, even though there never was any passion between them.(105) He was a football quarterback(51) and "intercollegiate state middleweight champion"(52) in boxing, and got his masters degree at nineteen.(49) Having previously taught in Kansas,(27) he is now a biologist,(36) drinks "Bourbon on the rocks, if you don't mind,"(23) and has no children.
Honey, twenty-six,(35) is a "mousey little type, without any hips, or anything,"(10) who "gets sick quite easily."(89) She played doctor with Nick when she was six,(104) always expected to marry him, and did when she had "a hysterical pregnancy,"(94) but has never had children.(39) She has money(102) because her father "was a man of the Lord, and he was very rich."(108) She drinks brandy.(23)
The house in which Martha and George live is old,(42) with at least a main floor and an upstairs.(159,173) It has a tiled bathroom,(160) a kitchen,(39) a linen closet,(61) and other rooms not specified. In the living room there is a portable bar,(8) an abstract painting,(21) and a record player and recording of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.(127) Other items specified are that there are doorbell chimes,(17) a bathtub and a freezer,(61) as well as at least the one book from which George reads.(168)
The "New England"(38) college campus is either a "college"(41,173) or a university,(27,31,32) and on or near its campus is Daddy's greenhouse.(198)
When Stagwoolf begins, it is two o'clock very early on a September, Sunday morning after a Saturday night faculty party given by Daddy,(3,7,8,10,11,12,26,l58,217) Martha and George have "guests coming over"(8) "because Daddy said we should be nice to them, that's why."(10) The time is stated as two-thirty(46) some 0:29:15 after the curtain rises.6 Later, when the time is stated as "four o'clock in the morning,"(169) the actual elapsed time from the opening curtain, including the first intermission, will be almost the two hours that the performers have indicated has passed.7 In the original New York production, Arthur Hill sat down to read a newspaper as the curtain fell on Act One, and he was still reading this newspaper when the curtain rose on Act Two. The suggestion is that even though there was an intermission, the action continued, and chronological time was not interrupted. What action there was took place among the three characters who were off stage, unseen whether or not the curtain had remained up.
This information is little enough to work with, but it does give some specifics which cannot be denied by a stage director. Whatever else may be implied by the script, these facts are stated. From these bare facts, and what else he may think is implied in the drama, the director fashions his production. It is worth considering what director Alan Schneider presented in the original New York production:
<The stage setting of the New York production implicated the entire American educated community. It showed a tasteful home, with fitted, recessed bookshelves, hi-fi, curtains, fireplace, early American period furniture, oak beams, a wrought-iron colonial eagle, an American flag queerly reversed, an impressionist painting over the mantel--the comforts of modern living side by side with rough-hewn tokens of the revolutionary past, but dominating them: an American House of Intellect.>8
In an interview with playwright Albee, Michael Rutenberg asked: "Had you ever considered a less realistic setting . . " and Albee replied: "No I hadn't ever thought of the more abstract set."9
Diana Trilling answers the question, "Who's Afraid of the Culture Elite?" with the response, "You are, Reader: that's why it's so reassuring to see intellectuals at each other's throats."10 She argues the case that the audience responds to the specific actualities of the play, not to symbols or allegories. Her position is supported in a letter to the editor of Commentary, which asserts that contrary to the "assumption that the play is a mass of symbols and allegories, it is, like all works of art in the theater . . . a dialogue between living human beings."11 Allan Lewis suggests too, that "Many prefer to limit the play to a messy insight into domestic butchery."12 The positive position for which Miss Trilling stands is one level of interpretation that cannot be easily overlooked: "Mr. Albee's public receives his play . . . as a transcription of life as it actually is, as truth--moral truth, psychological truth, social truth, one or all of these truths but truth."13
She presents her argument in several stages; Albee's view of life cannot be refuted for it is the view of contemporary literary thoughts the audience takes delight in seeing educators as not so ideal after all, and the play confers a privilege of cultural status to the viewer. Thus Stagwoolf confirms a view of life that the audience wants to see. Though this conclusion may reach too far in suggesting what an audience wants, the means by which that point is achieved are valuable to the question of the realistic level of the drama.
The "inside" view of the literature of democratic nations for the last several years is committed to a view of modern life that is "a pattern of meaningless violence alternated with emptiness."14 Writers who partake of this vision have long since ceased to see anything "except the emptiness that has already been seen and recorded."15 For years, the business of literature has been the teaching of how hopeless is modern life and how incapacitated are we to rise above it. Man must be beastly and desperate because the world is just that. Destiny has decreed a constant deterioration of humanity. We have seen so much of this in contemporary literature that we no longer question its truth, so when we see Martha and George tearing at each other destructively, and at the couple who visit them, we no longer ask for an explanation as to why they act this way.16
Indeed, we are rather delighted to see a college teacher and his wife, both educated people, acting this way, for at least two reasons. We live in a guilty age, feeling guilt towards our children and our parents, feeling guilty if we have money and if we don't, guilty towards both friends and enemies. We are glad to spend three hours at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the company of people on stage who project these feelings and show us we are not alone in hurting our husbands or wives. "Our bad condition is the inevitable fate, it is how things are bound to be."17 We are pleased, too, to see "that even the class which is supposed to have our traditional idealism in its keeping isn't all that ideal."18 It doesn't take Madison Avenue to make us sell out, for even those men who have been trained in all that history has to show, the best thought of the past, act viciously to their wives and those around them and live in our current desperate condition. "This is unimpeachable authority for the rest of mankind, which has not had such advantages as the well-educated professor."19
In this manner the audience may be comforted by the play as a sort of self-validation, even of their own shortcomings. The audience also attains a cultural status in being "let in" to the play's real story. The dialogue of Stagwoolf is not common American speech, but has a particular brand of sophistication, a sophistication of a very literate present-day intellectual class. To understand this language is, in effect, to join a privileged club. Though the club's members join so as to rise above their previous status level, the club is not, in Stagwoolf, an exclusive one. Instead, its very presentation to the general public assumes that the playgoer
<. . . could enjoy Martha and George's sophisticated idiom. The play made them a gift of status. It permanently added to their sense of having successfully tuned in on a hitherto closed circuit.>20
The world of the literary artist and the teacher, once so exclusives, has been opened to the playgoer who readily accepts its reality and who feels privileged in the guilt it removes from his shoulders and in the status it confers upon him.21
Miss Trilling concludes that "A truly radical insight into the human situation has never at any time been as comfortably contained as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would appear to be by its large public."22 Our desperate condition~ which Albee so clearly depicts, would hardly be as acceptable to the theatergoing audience were it not set in the realistic world of academia thus allowing us to transfer our personal guilt onto the shoulders of our educated peers, and gain new status in acceptance of this picture of academia as a truthful one.
Though the realistic trappings of production are often only a necessary framework to the revelation of the universal implications of a play, and may act as such for some levels of interpretation of Stagwoolf, they also produce an effect in and of themselves that cannot be overlooked for a large part of the audience. A surrealistic, illusionistic, or otherwise non-realistic production, or any other device to remove the happenings from academia, would deprive the play of at least one significant level of operation.
Were not an article by Edward Albee published almost three years after Miss Trilling's article, one might even be tempted to suggest that she arrived at her original thesis, that the audience accepts Stagwoolf as truth, from his own words:
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will more often than not accomplish the opposite. A good writer writes what he believes to be true; a bad writer puts down what he believes his readers believe to be true. The good writer believes the intellectual and moral responsibility of his audience to be equal to his own; the bad writer considers the opposite posture proper. The popularity of a piece of writing will always tell you more about the state of critical letters and public taste than it will about the excellence of the work.23
1. Stagwoolf, unnumbered introductory material.
2. Cf. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, ?" New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, XXIII (Week of October 22, 1962), pp. 251-254.
3. Allan Lewis, "The Fun and Games of Edward Albee," Educational Theatre Journal, XVI (March, 1964), pp. 33-34.
4. Geri Trotta, "On Stage: Edward Albee," Horizon, IV (September, 1961), p. 79.
5. Stagwoolf, pp. 32, 54. Throughout the text of this dissertation, numbers in parentheses and superscript refer to the page on which the information is documented or from which it is quoted in the Athenaeum edition. Should the context indicate Cinewoolf, the reference is to this same Athenaeum edition as corrected to changes, listed in Appendix A, to make it read as the dialogue screenplay of Cinewoolf.
6. All timings of Stagwoolf are based on the Columbia Records phonograph recording of the original New York production, and are given in hours, minutes and seconds, or minutes and seconds.
7. "Four o'clock" will be exactly two hours after "two o'clock" if the intermission lasts eleven minutes.
8. Lee Baxendall, "The Theatre of Edward Albee," Tulane Drama Review, IX (Summer, 1965), pp. 30-31.
9. Michael E. Rutenberg, "Edward Albee: Social Critic" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, Jane, 1965), pp. 150-151.
10. Diana Trilling, "Who's Afraid of the Culture Elite?" Esquire, LX (December, 1963), p. 69.
11. Lee R. Bobker, "Albee vs. Chester," Letter to the editor, Commentary, XXXV (October, 1963), p. 275.
12. Lewis, loc. cit.
13. Trilling, op. cit., p. 76.
14. Ibid., p. 83.
15. Ibid., p. 87.
16. Ibid., pp. 76-77.
17. Ibid., pp. 78,80.
18. Ibid., p. 80.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 83.
21. Ibid., pp. 82-84.
22. Ibid., p. 88.
23. Edward Albee, "Creativity and Commitment," Saturday Review, XLIX (June 4, 1966), p. 26.