Do you have the feeling that so much of the theater in modern America is designed to undermine morality, patriotism, private enterprise, and even ordinary civility in language? Well, just because you might be paranoid doesn’t mean that playwrights and producers are not out to sabotage traditional values. They just might be.
Each one who attends the theater in New York is given a copy of “Playbill.” This is not only the program for the evening, giving the cast of characters and information about the actors, but it is a little magazine which includes ads and general commentary about the theater.
While attending a Broadway play this summer and waiting for the curtain to rise, I read one of the articles in the current Playbill, and it was very revealing. The article (which had no relation to the play I was attending) was about Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which opened on Broadway in 1962.
The play was a huge success. It won five Tony awards. It was named best play of the year and was acclaimed by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. The drama presented several hours of a quarreling husband and wife, viciously tearing each other to bits and destroying their marriage and illusions, one of which was a fantasy child. The Pulitzer Committee refused to honor the play because of its rough language. (Remember, that was in 1962.)
Drama critics at the time universally identified “Virginia Woolf” as an indictment of marriage. (Again, remember that it opened on the eve of the movement for sexual liberation.)
But now the plot thickens. The author of the article in the 1986 “Playbill,” Paul H. Tannenbaum, relates this personal story. He tells how, in 1962, he explained to his classes at Hofstra University, and also wrote a letter to the New York Times, stating that the play was really political, and that author Albee was writing, not about the failure of a marriage, but about the destruction of the American Dream.
Tannenbaum said he was laughed at for saying this and even called a nut. He was criticized in two textbooks on communication and accused of reading extreme meanings into art. Apparently, Tannenbaum got the treatment customarily meted out to those who are accused of “seeing things hiding under the bed” when they warn of threats to the American way.
Tannenbaum analyzed “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as a brutal allegory describing the playwright’s disappointment in the American system. The principal characters were named George and Martha to symbolize the parents of our nation. They lived at New Carthage University, which represented the ruins of the old world.
Their fantasy child, the dream they shared between them, represented the new country, America. George’s boyhood memory of killing his mother represented Mother England, and his feeling of exhilaration and drinking represented the rebellion of a young nation against its parents.
Martha represented the mercantile business establishment in a materialistic society. George represented intellectual, democratic liberalism. After their long marriage, the materialistic society was disappointed that liberal intellectualism was unable to take over from the old establishment (represented by Martha’s father, the college president).
The other characters in the play were symbolic, too. The young scientist represented the technology of the future. His wife, a “little mouse,” was the inheritor of the church and its money, full of fear, represented by her hysterical pregnancy which caused her to blow up, then deflate.
So Martha, the commercial establishment, seduced the young man who represented scientific genius. He was attracted to her because he was ambitious, but he ultimately became the houseboy of the commercial establishment. The ending leaves no hope for the American Dream.
Originally, all this was merely one man’s opinion about “Virginia Woolf” (and there is no evidence that the one man is a conservative). However, when the playwright directed a Broadway revival in 1976, Albee stated in a New York Times interview: “The play is an examination of whether or not we, as a society, have failed the members of the American Revolution. There’s no argument that George and Martha were named after George and Martha Washington. And their non-existent child is our failure to follow those principles, not staying an adventurous and revolutionary society.”
So, it’s true, after all. The playwright masked his disdain for the American free economic system in an allegory of a quarreling couple torn by conflict and frustration, with no hope for the future.
