Few Fears on This ‘Virginia Woolf ‘ : Author Albee directs to keep control of his plays

With sunlight streaming into the living room of his suite at a West Hollywood low-profile/high-celebrity hotel, Edward Albee ruminated on what it’s like to direct his own plays.

“It’s a new experience each time,” he said. “This is only the second time I’ve directed ‘Virginia Woolf.’ I did it on Broadway in 1976 with Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara. It went very nicely, got good press. This time, I’m learning more about the play.”

“This time” refers to the production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that opens Wednesday as part of the Ahmanson season at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood. John Lithgow and Glenda Jackson are the warring George and Martha.

“I don’t think I have any specific problems with it,” Albee said. “I think I know my way around the play by now. I know the pitfalls.”

Albee sat back on the couch, smiling, exuding confidence. His energetic demeanor belies his 61 years. His movements are brisk and their subtext one of intensely focused energy and effortless control. At a rehearsal later that week, he prowled the darkness like a cat, watchful and alert, taking as much from his actors as he was giving back.

On stage, Jackson dominated, asking questions, suggesting crosses, rejecting them, trying something else. Earlier she had confessed to this writer that “the major hurdle here is (coming up with) an American accent that doesn’t make every American cringe. Martha can’t be English.” Otherwise, she had added, almost as caustically as Martha, “the challenges are the same.”

“It’s always difficult.”

Working with the playwright might have been a hurdle too, “because authors can be overly protective of their work,” she said, “but that isn’t the case with Edward, whom I find very open.

“It’s always exciting for me to work with Americans. They’re so direct. American audiences are immediate in their responses. In England (they) tend to wait until the curtain comes down to express an opinion, which is too late for me. I like to know what’s happening while it’s happening.”

“George thinks much, much more quickly than I do,” said the sunny John Lithgow, who conceded that George is a formidable challenge. “He’s so cerebral, so incredibly in control. My instinct as an actor is to take a visceral approach, so initially, I tended to pound away, to treat George’s very destructive games as bombast, dropping the nuclear bomb over and over again.

“I used the brickbat approach instead of the stiletto. Edward is constantly asking me to take out the yelling and purr.”

But he’s energized by Jackson.

“She’s very uncompromising, very attentive to foundation,” he said. “We simply don’t move on until we’ve solved the problem. She’s become our bellwether. Glenda’s discomfort guides us.”

It is partly to assert his grip over the dominion of his work that Albee, early on, chose to learn how to direct.

“It occurred to me that an author who was a director as well could probably give a very accurate representation of the play he had in his head. I’d noticed that (Samuel) Beckett directed his plays, (Jean) Anouilh directed his, (Bertolt) Brecht directed his, Jack Gelber directed his. A lot of people, going back to Moliere and Shakespeare.

“So I staged a production of ‘The Zoo Story’ in 1963 which, fortunately, played somewhere deep in Pennsylvania. I’d had no training. I just thought I could direct it. It was probably the worst production of any play of mine I’d ever seen.

“I was unable to communicate any of the thoughts that I had about it. It occurred to me then that there might be some craft involved and I started studying directing--not going to director’s school, but I’d watch others direct my work, and talk to them.”

He hand-picked his masters: Peter Hall (“A Delicate Balance” and “All Over”), Jean-Louis Barrault (“A Delicate Balance”), Ingmar Bergman and Franco Zefirelli (“Virginia Woolf”).

“I also started going to plays with that in mind,” he said. “I’d read them first, imagined how I would direct them, then see them directed and figure out what the differences were. Then I just started directing more of my own stuff Off Broadway.”

His first major plunge as a director was the staging of seven of his one-act plays for a nationwide tour of universities (“Albee Directs Albee,” 1968). Less than ten years later, in 1975, he took the leap directing his play “Seascape” on Broadway.

“It didn’t do too badly,” he deadpanned. “It won the Pulitzer Prize and got very nice notices.” The next year, Broadway saw his revival of “Virginia Woolf.”

“That gave me my sea legs, pretty much,” he said. “I discovered I could get over this problem that actors--more in theory than in fact--are reputed to have, that playwrights should not direct their own work because they’re too close to it. I separate myself very nicely. I can be severe with my own text. I’ll cut it if it doesn’t work. For the world premieres of some of my plays that I’ve directed, I’m much quicker to make changes. But I won’t let another director do it.”

The reporter reminded the playwright of the flap that ensued when director Bill Ball “restructured” Albee’s most impenetrable play, “Tiny Alice,” at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre in the mid-’70s.

“Well, he was rewriting Shakespeare and everybody else,” Albee argued with mock flippancy, “why shouldn’t he rewrite Albee? This was ‘Tiny Alice.’ Too confusing. He thought he would clarify it. And I thought his clarifications were further obfuscations. I also didn’t like scenes and speeches moved from one act to another. I do compose my plays with a certain care and think things should be where they are.”

Through some bureaucratic slip, ACT had also neglected to acquire the rights to the play. This created a peculiar circumstance. “Had there been a signed contract, they would have been in violation of it,” Albee said. “But there was no signed contract.”

Publisher Samuel French, Albee’s agents and the Dramatists’ Guild, he discovered, couldn’t help, because there was no written agreement about which to disagree.

“I suppose I could have gotten an injunction,” he said, “but I was on my way to Japan for the State Department, having terrible back trouble, in an awful brace and in a very bad mood.”

So he held a press conference instead and brought enough ire to the situation to turn it around. When contracts were finally signed, the playwright exacted double royalties. And got them.

Albee’s contracts, in fact, carry more than the usual number of specifics. Aside from the customary protections that stipulate there may be no additions, deletions or changes without the author’s permission, there is also the injunction that his plays must be performed before “fully integrated audiences” (aimed chiefly at South Africa, where his one-act, “The Death of Bessie Smith,” helped break the color line)--and that there can be no gender changes among the characters in “Virginia Woolf.”

That had to be added, Albee said, “since that awful nonsense about the play having been written for two male couples--something some movie critic (suggested) because he couldn’t accept it as an accurate representation of heterosexual relationships.

“It was his problem,” Albee winced, “but he made it mine.”

Otherwise, Albee is finding “relatively few” difficulties directing the current edition of “Virginia Woolf” and blames the cast for this condition (“marvelous actors, know their business”).

“The (original) production in ’62 was very good,” he said. “Alan Schneider did a first-rate job directing it. But maybe because the play was so new, so shocking--people were hypocritically shocked by it--it didn’t seem terribly funny. It’s always struck me as being deadly serious and very funny.

“One of the reasons I wanted to direct it in ’76 was to bring some of that back into focus--not to soften any of the toughness, but to make it clear that this play has a lot of very funny stuff in it. Also, maybe audiences had gotten a little less hypocritical by then, less easily shocked, and so they found the play both serious and funny.”

This time he is also emphatic about one other thing:

“Walter Kerr, when he reviewed the play in 1962, admired it a lot, but said it had a hole in its head. He could not accept the invention of the nonexistent child. He thought these people were far too bright to have done this. Of course, that’s the entire point. They’re bright enough to have done it.

“And one of the things I’m making terribly clear in this production--without distorting, I don’t believe in distorting anything, not even giving undue emphasis to, but making it absolutely clear--is that these people are indeed bright enough, inventive enough and mutually supportive enough to be able to levitate a metaphor, if you will, of 21 years. That’s terribly important. The play is about the death of that metaphor.”

How did Albee like the film?

“When Warner Bros. approached me about it, I said, ‘Who do you plan to put in it?’ They said, ‘Bette Davis and James Mason,’ both of whom were exactly the right age at that time. So I sold it to them, and then Davis and Mason turned into Burton and Taylor.

“How did I like it,” he growled. “There are rumors that there was a script that changed the nonexistent child into a heavily retarded real child--I’m told this, I never saw it--and I’m also told that when Burton and Taylor and the director, Mike Nichols, read (it), they said they wouldn’t do the movie.

“Apparently, the screenplay was rewritten several times and except for those those two famous sentences, ‘Let’s go to the Roadhouse’ and ‘Let’s come back from the Roadhouse,’ which I did not write and never would write, ever, in any context, the words in the movie are pretty much mine. I think I’m lucky it came out as well as it did. The thing that bothered me about the film is that it isn’t funny. I think it has something to do for an audience with the difference between a stage and a film experience.”

How does it feel to have another English actress playing Martha?

“I can tell you best,” he said, “by telling you that at an art park, 55 miles south of Tokyo called Hakone, I saw a production of ‘The Zoo Story,’ outdoors, in Japanese. Within a few minutes I was seeing and hearing the play in English. Does that answer the question?

“It makes absolutely no difference. Glenda has none of that reserve the English are famous for. She’s capable of being broad and a bawd. She doesn’t have a silly or bizarre English accent. I don’t even notice that she’s English.”

In January, Albee will be staging “Virginia Woolf” at the Alley Theatre in Houston where it will play a limited engagement, tour the country for another eight weeks and then go to the Soviet Union.

“It occurred to me,” Albee said, “why don’t we get very, very good standbys here and make them the Houston company?”

And that’s what he did.

The standbys are Carol Mayo Jenkins (Martha), Bruce Gray (George), John Ottavino (Nick) and Cynthia Bassham (Honey).

“They’re first-rate and it saves me a lot of time,” he said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “I thought that was pretty inventive of me.”