The Thunderclap Series #9: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I first encountered Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in high school. All the texts we studied in my Critical Writing class – Animal Farm, The Chosen, Brave New World, Merchant of Venice – impacted me deeply, but Woolf left the deepest mark. 

I almost didn’t finish it. We were reading it aloud in class, you see, and the content – both language and subject matter – is incredibly “mature”. It was almost too much for seventeen-year-old Ruth’s sheltered mind and sensitive heart; but, once I had begun, I needed to know how it ended. So, I excused myself from the classroom read-aloud sessions so I could finish it quietly by myself.

I am forever glad I persevered.

I don’t want to give too much away, but here’s a taste of the plot: George and Martha are a middle-aged married couple. George is a college history professor; Martha is the daughter of the college president. One night, after a faculty party, they invite a new professor and his wife, Nick and Honey, over to their house for a drink. The evening quickly devolves into a dark labyrinth of manipulation, deception, and revelation as George and Martha use Nick and Honey as pawns in their ongoing psychological games.

This downward spiral is reflected in the titles of the three acts:

Act 1 – Fun & Games
Act 2 – Walpurgisnacht (a “witches’ Sabbath”, when witches gather to engage in rituals and revels)
Act 3 – The Exorcism

If that sounds dark as all get out . . . you’re not wrong. But, when I finished reading Woolf, darkness was not my primary feeling. 

It was hope.

As with Jane Eyre, I remember where I was when I finished Woolf: curled up in my reading chair in my room in Massachusetts, a spot where I finished – and cried over – many a good book. As I sat with George and Martha in the numb wreckage that is the end of the play, watching Sunday morning dawn over their shell-shocked faces, I tasted freedom in the air – freedom, and new beginnings, and the hope of new life, now that the poison of the old had been burned away.

The title of the third act confirmed my interpretation of the play’s events. I even wrote a paper on it. After all “exorcism” is the DEFEAT of a demon, not its triumph. I fervently believed that George and Martha experience an “exorcism” of sorts in the third act – the removal of a secret that had been festering inside their marriage, eating both of them alive from the inside.

Casting it out leaves a terrible void – but what is a void, if not a blank page?

A chance to restart?

Absence meant to be filled with presence?

Of course, one could also fill a void with more – and even darker – darkness. But something about that final scene – about the simplicity and honesty of George and Martha’s sparse, monosyllabic conversation – made me think that they, at least, would not repeat their mistakes. The brutal sacrifices of the night would bear rich fruit for the future.

(For George and Martha, anyway. Nick and Honey . . . I had, and still have, little or no hope for them.)

Fast forward seven years, to when I was entering my final year of graduate school. My fellow MFA candidates and I were eagerly awaiting the assignment of our thesis roles. (To attain a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, you must research, rehearse, and perform a character, and then write a thesis about the process.)

I was both delighted – and alarmed – when I was cast as Honey in Woolf.

This was a special production. The department was partnering with a theatre in Atlanta, so we had a three-week run at a professional theatre in addition to our university theatre performances. Furthermore, two of my professors – with whom I had been working very closely for two years, and both of whom I respected and admired deeply – were cast as George and Martha, with one of my grad colleagues taking the role of Nick.