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7. Getting the Guests
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7 Getting the Guests There’s . . . so much . . . over the dam, so many . . . disappointments, evasions, I guess, lies maybe . . . so much we remember we wanted, once . . . so little that we’ve . . . settled for . . . we talk, sometimes, but mostly . . . no. —Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance Midway through the first act of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1962), winding up the first round of “Humiliate the Host,” Martha describes boxing George into a huckleberry bush. In Mike Nichols’s 1966 film version of the play, George exits during Martha’s story and the camera follows him “offstage” into the back hall. While Martha continues to speak in the living room, the camera closes on George’s facial reactions to her derisive tale. The handheld camera stays with George as he walks down the hall and opens the door to a back closet and turns on the light; then it looks down on him from an angle just above his head, as if it were on the top shelf of the closet, as he locates a bundle and carefully unwraps a rifle. A single incandescent lightbulb swinging in the foreground heightens the murderous look on his face. The camera then assumes George’s point of view as he returns to the living room and stalks his prey (Martha) from behind. Seeing the victim from the killer’s point of view is standard suspense stuff. The camera follows the gun sight down the barrel to the back of Martha’s head, then cuts to close-ups of Honey’s and Nick’s horrified reactions, and then a shot of Martha’s turn toward the gun, and a zoom-lens close-up of her startled eyes. Suddenly, the point of view reverses to an objective position on the other side of Martha, and the camera faces the rifle as George pulls the trigger and a colorful Japanese parasol pops out to the shock, startled relief, and subsequent laughter of all. The camera shot that ends the sequence above is the only one that captures the reactions of all the players from the point of view of a theatrical audience. While the film follows the same text as Albee’s play, that scene onstage is more primitive and at the same time much more inscrutable than its film counterpart. A theatrical audience can’t follow George offstage and thus can’t see his reactions to Martha’s story. He simply leaves and the story continues with no cutting between what is said in the living room and George’s reactions to those words in the back hall. A theatrical audience, too, can’t see the scene from George’s point of view. When he returns a short time later, he conceals a short-barreled 92 / Chapter 7 shotgun behind his back, so the audience doesn’t suspect that he is hiding anything and never even sees the gun until George raises it to Martha’s head. When he attempts to shoot her onstage, Nick and Honey react in concert with the audience in the theater. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? plays a very different game onstage with an audience than does the film version of the same drama. By using all the conventions of the suspense thriller, the film tricks the audience into believing that George really might murder Martha. This is quite false. As played by Richard Burton, George appears intent to kill Martha. At least that is what the audience thinks. Obviously, though, the character himself knows that the gun is a toy; George procured it and put it away to save for a special occasion. The film encourages the audience to believe something that does not reflect George’s true feelings, and the camera techniques and the editing reinforce an illusion/reality theme. Onstage, however, an audience can’t see what runs through George’s mind; it doesn’t have access to his brooding face. The actor, then, can honestly play the intent, to scare Martha, when he enters the scene with the fake gun behind his back. George harbors no latent desire to murder Martha; he merely wishes to scare her and to win the game that he is playing at all costs. The honesty of the stage drama counters the misleading dazzle of the film and highlights the rules of engagement by which George and Martha do battle. Innately theatrical, the games spark their lives in a brutally dull world of heartbreaking disappointments. A gross...