Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Stephen J. Bottoms (review)

Reviews contribution to Williams scholarship and merit a round of applause for their production of the multiple-gendered selves of America's greatest playwrightshowman . STEPHEN J. BOTTOMS. Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 204, illustrated. $54.95 (Hb); $19.95. (Pb). Reviewed by Christopher Bigsby, University ofEast Anglia ' Books about the history of individual plays in production can be reminiscent of those Victorian museum displays of multicoloured butterflies, killed by ether, pierced with a pin, and identified, in Indian ink, on a rectangular piece of ivory card. Everything is there but the life. However, I must confess that the Cambridge University Press series, Plays in Production, of which Stephen Bottoms' Albee: Who's Afraid ofVirginia Woolf? is one volume, can work the other way around. The pin is removed and the butterfly wings begin to tremble. Nonetheless, in being reminded that we are dealing with the evanescent, there is an undeniable element of frustration. These are accounts of the party we missed. It is like offering your children in-flight menu cards to show them what a good time you had. However, how else are we to be reminded ofa play's multiple lives, of shifting interpretations, of the transformations wrought not simply by directors, actors, and designers, but by a changing context? As Bottoms confesses, though, Who's Afraid ofVirginia Woolf? might seem particularly resistant not only to study in terms of production history, but also in some senses to directors and actors. This, after all, is not Julius Caesar relocated to a Fascist state, but a one-set, apparently realistic, modem play, featuring four actors whose actions are so carefully choreographed (down to the timing of ice cubes dropped into glasses) that its original production benefitted from being rehearsed throughout on stage, in set. The surprise is that Bottoms is able to demonstrate the extent to which the play did transmute over time and with different casts. How do you reconstitute performances, even those which go back a mere forty years? The answer, it seems, is by means of interviews, reviews, and where available, sound and, occasionally, video recordings. It is not a foolproof method, as anyone who has seen a video of a production they attended can attest. In particular, the audience, a key, of course, to performance, is missing. Indeed, the very notion of "an" audience is itself not without its problematics. Bottoms speaks, for example, of the 1976 Broadway production, with Albee himself as director, as one in which the author's intentions were triumphantly apparent (to whom, one might ask), to which critical response was positive, but 166 REVIEWS from which audiences stayed away. What, then, constitutes a successful production? Why does one·production seemingly connect with an audience and another not? He argues, plausibly, that the existence of the film version, admittedly ten years old by that time, was perhaps a key factor (and he offers a fascinating account of that film), but that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the supposed attractions of theatre, uniquely responsive to the shifting pressures of performance, the dynamic of particular audiences, appealing precisely because live. It resists notions of the definitive, the fixed, a fact that otherwise this book ably demonstrates. If audiences choose to opt for a film version, then, entirely unresponsive to these conditions, what does this say about the nature of the experience Bottoms sets out to capture in tracing the production history of a particular play? Those, then, are some of the difficulties of the book. Bottoms, however, not only offers a perceptive account of a series of productions of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but in some senses justifies the undertaking itself, for here is a familiar play laid out for us from inception through multiple productions in a way that does throw light on the play and, not incidentally, on those who have staged it. And if there is an occasional tension between Bottoms' own absolute critical assurance as to the play's meaning and the shifting interpretations of those he chronicles, this is in fact the tension with which actors and directors must wrestle every time they gather to stage...