Exit
of Elizabeth Taylor, who won an
Academy Award for her performance. Taylor was in her early
30s at the time, playing Martha,
20 years her senior.
“She’s much too young, she
looks wrong, but why not hire her?
Whose aesthetic is that?” Albee
asks. “Not mine. I believe the comparative question came up, ‘Do you
want Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha?’ My answer
was and would be Bette Davis.”
Albee naturally isn’t as hard on
the productions he has had control
over: “Most productions that I allow to happen are good jobs,” he
says. “As long as they’re honest and
try hard, and succeed to a certain
extent, and tell the truth and don’t
lie, that’s all you can ask.”
Tracy Letts, who won a Pulitzer
Prize for his 2008 play August:
Osage County, stars in the current revival, giving a performance
that’s been called one of the most
revelatory Georges yet. He told the
Wall Street Journal, “George and
Martha are part of our cultural
fiber, and we see them reflected
throughout this culture in ways
we don’t even recognize.”
Perhaps it’s because much of
Woolf exists on a subtextual level.
Its themes emerge in moments
THEATER
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
that could slip past you, like when
George picks up a book and reads
a line aloud — “And the West,
encumbered by crippling alliances
and burdened with a morality too
rigid to accommodate itself to the
swing of events, must eventually
fall” — then laughs “ruefully”
and hurls it away.
“I always write about politics —
sometimes it’s rather disguised,”
Albee says. “How could you write
I believe the comparative
question came up, ‘Do you
want Bette Davis or Elizabeth
Taylor?’ My answer was and
would be Bette Davis.”
about the country and your people
if you don’t talk about politics
among many other things?”
An outspoken liberal, Albee
should have as much to write
about his country as ever. “We’re
in terrible trouble, morally, politically, and intellectually, in this
country, and I’m desperately worried about it,” he told the Telegraph last year. More worried
than at any point previous?
“Probably. And also less,”
he adds, his eyes flickering.