bergin makes it worse…

Play review:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A 1962 play by Edward Albee

New York: Scribner Classics, 1962, 2003

243 pages

It’s not a feel-good play.

After you start to move again after you finish reading it, probably you’ll end up thinking that your life is better than you thought it was. George and Martha do a pretty good job of proving that hell on earth is possible.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is almost a non-stop exaltation of how to be mean, sad, vicious, heartbroken, desperate, delirious, murderous, inhibited, ignorant, ambitious, empty, and longing, more or less all at the same time.

George and Martha, an aging couple on a rundown college campus, stage their terrible show for the benefit of a young professor, Nick, and his young wife, Honey, in the wee hours of a morning when each of them has something better to do, but isn’t doing it.

None of them make you think of the Cleaver family.

Arthur Hill was George and Uta Hagen was Martha in the first stage presentation in October 1962.

In the 1966 film version, Richard Burton was George and Elizabeth Taylor was Martha.

Both productions are slam bang downers, just like the play.

No production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will make you think of the Cleavers.

* * * * * *

Book review: Shantung Compound

They didn’t care much

about each other…

by Langdon Gilkey

click here

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”