Exit
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
THEATER
VIRGINIA WOOLF THROUGH THE YEARS
LEFT TO RIGHT: API/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES; TIM WHITBY/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES;
TARGET PRESSE AGENTUR GMBH/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL BROSILOW
THE FILM
Opening: 06.22.1966,
Los Angeles
Starring: Elizabeth
Taylor and Richard
Burton
THE TURNER TAKE
Opening: 03.20.2005,
Longacre Theatre,
New York
Starring: Kathleen
Turner and Bill Irwin
wife, the daughter of the university’s dean — throw at one another
while hosting a new, younger professor and his wife, Nick and Honey, for a boozy, 2 a.m. nightcap.
“Braying” Martha and George, the
“cluck,” as they affectionately call
one another, engage in a series of
ugly “games” aimed right where it
most wounds the other, eventually
pulling their guests into the fray
(the game: “get the guests”). This,
in a time when America’s idea of
a marriage drama was The Dick
Van Dyke Show.
Over the years, productions of
Woolf have struggled to hit the
play’s sweet spot, between the intellectual and the emotional, or the
THE GERMAN TAKE
Opening: 12.18.2011,
Theater am
Kurfuerstendamm,
Berlin
Starring: Katja
Riemann and Rene
Luedicke
THE LATEST
Opening: 10.13.2012,
Booth Theater,
New York
Starring: Tracy Letts
and Amy Morton
“mind and the gut,” as Albee has
put it. He told Rakesh H. Solomon,
author of Albee in Performance,
that the first, Tony Award-winning Broadway production in 1962
skewed a little too emotional. But
it’s the most widely-known version of Woolf that’s strayed furthest
— the 1966 film starring Elizabeth
Taylor and Richard Burton, who
were two years married at the time.
Soon after its release, Albee said
in an interview in the Paris Review
that “only the emotional aspect
shows through. The intellectual underpinning isn’t clear.” While Albee
has been kind to the film, he says
“they fucked up a lot, too.”
“They changed whole sections,
and they were not faithful to my
intention,” he gripes. One of the
biggest leaps came in the hiring