Broadway Babylon (28 page)

Controversy dogged and stimulated
Virginia Woolf’s
success, for Albee, an avowed student of Williams’s work, realized that “bad” but effective box-office publicity often adhered to plays featuring overtly sexual female characters. “The straight men, as they choose to call themselves, give [audiences] women who are sex objects and seldom women with sexual objectives of their own,” Tennessee once wrote. Albee commenced
Woolf
with the character of Martha, then added husband George and built a plot.

Much of the play revolves around Martha’s pursuit of an affair with a younger man. In the early 1960s, that led to several critics’ accusations that this was a thinly disguised story of a gay marriage, a homosexual play in heterosexual clothing. Some said Martha, in light of her foul language and promiscuity, must be a man in drag. Katharine Hepburn, averse to controversial projects since playing a very convincing “youth” in the 1935 film flop
Sylvia Scarlett
, declined to play Martha when offered the role, disingenuously claiming she wasn’t good enough.

George was offered to Henry Fonda, whose agent returned the “shocking” script unread without informing his client, who relished theater work and was seeking an image-busting challenge. When he later found out, Fonda was livid. He spoke with Albee about eventually working together. Albee hoped Fonda would be able to play Charlie in
Seascape
, but Fonda was committed to a film and was thus unavailable. Bette Davis, much more challenge-prone than Hepburn, recalled that she’d longed to play Martha on stage or screen and had pursued the role. However, she only became interested once
Woolf
proved a hit. Said Richard Barr, “Miss Davis wasn’t particularly theatrically oriented. Unlike Tennessee Williams’s, Edward Albee’s name wasn’t yet big enough for her to expend her talents on.” Davis did appear on Broadway in Williams’s
The Night of the Iguana
.

Richard Barr and company had sought backers for
Virginia Woolf
among numerous producing organizations and theaters, in vain. They found the material too abrasive and coarse, even though its roster of four-letter words was briefer than publicity would later have it. Fabled impresario Billy Rose, best known for his “girlie” shows, came to Barr’s unexpected rescue.

In 1958, Rose had bought the National Theatre on Forty-First Street and had it given his name. He was thus able to claim all manner of expenses to the
Internal Revenue Service. But once in a while a legitimate hit show was needed to offset the losses, real and alleged. “Rose was a slice away from being an out-and-out con man,” explained Barr, who’d hesitantly presented Rose with Albee’s script. True to form, Rose didn’t read it, but relied on the recommendation of an educated young man employed in his office.

Rose did read the title, and liked it. He also believed if this oddball work were marketed as a “dirty” play, it might become the hit he now needed. Rose thought the title very funny—although he was unfamiliar with the daunting bisexual authoress. Unfortunately, the tune to
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
could not be used in the play because its lyricist, Ann Ronell, was still alive and demanded big bucks for its usage, primarily because Walt Disney had paid her peanuts when it was used in his
Three Little Pigs
cartoon. Co-producer Clinton Wilder later substituted the melody of the nursery rhyme “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush” for use with the play’s “title song,” which is sung in the play.

Although numerous stars were approached, it became apparent that no big names would be appearing in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
At this point, Richard Barr proposed a publicity stunt:
two
productions of the play, one on Broadway and one Off-, both opening the same night. This, partly to point up the double standard by which serious, “controversial,” or gay-themed plays were dismissed, even shunted aside by Broadway. The parsimonious Rose vetoed the idea.

Martha eventually devolved upon the highly respected and very selective but not necessarily box-office actress Uta Hagen, today revered in memory as a great acting teacher. She’d been away from Broadway for six years, and had succeeded Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. George was Canadian actor Arthur Hill, who’d appeared on Broadway in
Look Homeward, Angel
and
All the Way Home
. A pre-blonde Melinda Dillon played Honey and Nick was George Grizzard; Richard Barr had declined contender George Segal, who was Jewish, as “too ethnic,” but in the celebrated screen version Segal was Oscar-nominated along with his three castmates—Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis won, he and Richard Burton didn’t.

Virginia Woolf did
not try out out of town. It was controversial enough for more sophisticated New York, where it opened Off-Broadway on October 13, 1962, at a cost of $75,000. The play would return at least thirty times its cost to investors, who included Edward Albee—Barr and his partner had decided to make the playwright another partner in their company, with twenty-five percent of weekly operating profits rather than the ten percent he would have gotten via the Dramatists Guild’s Minimum Basic Contract.

“Albee will be all right,” Richard said of Edward’s fiscal prospects after the play had been running a few weeks.

It was the cementing of a beautiful professional friendship. Wealth and a parade of prizes would be the frosting on Albee’s literary cake. He explained, “I write for me. For the audience of me. If other people come along for the ride then it’s great.”

Barr wondered, “Why not take a journey with an interesting, intellectual, and unusual human being? Too many theatregoers trust to the opinion of a critic. I think critics are part of the publicity process, for better and typically worse. But if the man who wrote
The Zoo Story
came up with a fresh, rather shocking new full-length play, any discerning theatergoer would want to see that. Plays are rather intimidating things even to a lot of theater lovers. That’s why so many trust to the critics, naively because, as it turns out, the critic is also in the business of publicizing himself and pushing his own sociopolitical agenda.… It’s just a—to me, surprising—fact: audiences, actors initially, and most producers are fearful of plays.”

S
URE ENOUGH, THE PIONEERING
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
scared and alienated many people. Critic Robert Coleman of New York’s
Mirror
called it “a sick play about sick people,” unnecessarily and royally adding, “We loathed it.” Veteran critic Walter Kerr in the
New York Herald Tribune
took a fairer approach: “It is a brilliant piece of writing.… It need not be liked, but it must be seen.” The lengthy and intense media debate over
Woolf
’s morality and crypto-homosexual origins (via Albee, known to be nonheterosexual, later openly so) was great for business.

Billy Rose, in seventh heaven, cackled, “Any playwright who can get that many laughs with that much venom and invents a game like Hump the Hostess is my kind of writer. I’ve got the hit I was looking for.” Under the table, Rose—who refused to lower his theater’s rent when the producers moved toward six rather than eight shows a week—made another fortune by selling prime house seats at sky-high prices to ticket brokers. That money wasn’t, of course, reported to the IRS. Later Barr revealed, “The money was carried to [Rose] nightly in a suitcase filled with cash by one of his minions after the treasurers and managers had received their split.” Rose publicly acknowledged making nearly $3,000,000 (legally) on
Woolf
’s run.

One negative opinion that inadvertently helped the box office was John Chapman’s
News
headline on October 21, “For Dirty-Minded Females Only.” Audiences naturally became curious about the play that was being so strenuously put down. (Actors invited to view
Woolf
were busily spreading the word about the quality of the acting and writing.) As more people saw
Woolf
, they—and the critical establishment—became aware that it wasn’t intended primarily to shock; it was
good
. Newspapers took a second look, and wrote about the phenomena that were
Virginia Woolf
and Edward Albee. Even
The Christian
Science Monitor
, which had dubbed Tennessee Williams “the poet laureate of degradation, decadence, and despair,” allowed that Albee’s play had substance and influence. The times were clearly though slowly a-changing.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
established producer Barr and playwright Albee big time and eventually became an American classic. Its film version was instrumental in ending the archconservative censorship code instigated in 1934, although a more subtle, commercially daunting censorship yet continues. The play did not sweep all the available awards, as many had predicted. “The Pulitzer [Prize] was denied to Albee,” said Barr. “It was voted, and
Woolf
won it, but it was held back.” The expert panel was in effect vetoed by the Trustees of Columbia University who give out the prize. The falling out and public dispute, noted Barr, was as “vitriolic as any of the loud shenanigans in George and Martha’s marriage … and don’t think the use of those two names—as in Washington, the First Couple of our country—didn’t infuriate those who noticed the historical allusion” (U.S. novelist and historian Gore Vidal has written that evidence indicates that the child-free father of his country may have been secretly gay, bisexual, or asexual).

In the end, the furor over the Pulitzer denial led to a change in how the prizes were awarded, granting more power to the judges and less to the moneymen and corporate figures cum trustees of the University. Albee went on to win three of them, his first in 1966 for
A Delicate Balance
; some saw it as a belated reward for
Woolf
, but
Balance
stands on its own merits.

Richard Barr added, “
Virginia Woolf
justified my aggressive hunch that a play can entertain, provoke, shock, and illumine… [and] that there is an audience for productions based on a strong play rather than on sheer spectacle, star power, or advertising campaigns.… It takes an Albee, and the Albees are rare, but I still contend and always will, that the play’s the thing.” Barr, who went on to a long and colorful theatrical career, died of AIDS in 1989 at 71.

As for Albee, he had his ups and downs before achieving legendary status among American playwrights. He followed
Virginia Woolf
s success with a on-hit adaptation of crypto-lesbian novelist Carson McCullers’s
The Ballad of the Sad Café
(1963), an essentially butch-lesbian tale with an ill-fitting traditionalist ending. His
Tiny Alice
was at times fascinating, but the allegory was vague and frustrating, more so because Albee blithely insisted in the published text that “the play is quite clear.” Writer Ethan Mordden called this “something between impishness and a swindle.” Albee resurrected the imaginary child from
Virginia Woolf
in
The American Dream
, and later still penned
The Play About the Baby
.

Indeed he does write for himself, yet at his best, when he questions and challenges society-as-usual, he writes for us all.

T
HE REVIEWS THAT GREETED
the 1965 Broadway comedy
And Things That Go Bump in the Night
were among or possibly even the worst in theater history. So venomous that many people wondered: was the play really that bad, that unfunny, or possibly that funny? As for young playwright Terrence McNally, some read between the reviews’ lines and correctly guessed that he was gay, for vicious reviews often accrue to iconoclastic and/or ambitious nonhetero playwrights.

The “atrocious” play kept going, partly because the “Things” company decided to keep it on at a mere $1.00 per ticket. Lines stretched around the block, and audiences discovered that the play was indeed hilarious and outrageous. It heralded a brilliant new talent who would become a long-running, occasionally controversial Broadway institution—and an openly gay voice. Even with
Ragtime
(1997), which had no gay characters, McNally figured, “I do my bit for the cause if
Ragtime
is a big hit and a good show and people say, ‘You know, the book writer’s gay.’ ”

The prolific McNally’s output has ranged from
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
and
Love! Valour! Compassion!
to
Master Class, A Perfect Ganesh, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
(a two-character heterosexual romance of sorts), and
The Ritz
, a mainstream hit set in a gay bath house.

McNally succeeded via both talent and persistence. Apart from the anti-reviews for his 1965 breakthrough, when he surfaced in the theater world he was already known as the love of now-openly gay dramatic playwright Edward Albee, with whom he lived for six years. Besides the thinly veiled animosity this created in many critics’ reviews of his work, McNally had to contend with early rumors that his plays were influenced or even partly written by the nine-years-older Albee. That is, until the two men’s writing styles and personas revealed themselves as almost antipodal. Now who’s afraid of things that go bump in the night?