Center for Arts slates controversial hit of ’62
What explodes is Godzilla versus King Kong, the mother of all marital battles — as the Murfreesboro Ensemble Theater brings the controversial Broadway hit of 1962, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to the Center for the Arts on March 13.
After the tragi-comedy won a Tony, Hollywood preserved its searing dialog virtually intact for the screen version, featuring a real-life married couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as the tart-tongued but failing professor, George, and his bitter, fault-finding wife, Martha. The movie version won five Academy Awards.
And MET’s production also features a real-life married couple who happen, like George and Martha, to be academics – Deborah Anderson, a theater professor at Middle Tennessee State University and Crosby Hunt, an English professor who additionally teaches theater on campus.
The play’s frank, vivid and mesmerizing dialog was shocking to audiences in the more conservative era of 1962. Four years later, despite studio warnings, the 1966 movie director Mike Nichols resisted watering down the controversial script, and somehow the jarring words leapfrogged the censors.
Watching George’s and Martha’s verbal and physical Roman circus are a young academic couple, Nick, an opportunistic new professor, and his mousy wife, Honey, who thought they were merely joining George and Martha for a post-faculty party nightcap – not destined to become pawns in their brutal head game war zone. MTSU theater grads Mike Barbieri and Lisa Marie Smith play George and Martha’s (at first) captive audience.
“Audiences become, like Nick and Honey, startled and transfixed observers who cannot turn away,” noted Dixon. “Why else would Nick and Honey have stayed until dawn?”
In the early 1960s, Albee’s play became a huge commercial success, hailed by critics as revolutionary. Within 10 years, Albee became the second most produced playwright on college campuses – after the venerable Bard himself, William Shakespeare. But controversy dogged the play right up to a battle over whether it would receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1962. That year, a selection committee awarded the play that honor, but overseeing Columbia University trustees vetoed the decision, and no play received the award – although in later, more tolerant years it garnered three Pulitzers.
Show times are 7:30 p.m., March 13 through 15 and March 20 through 22; 2 p.m. on March 16. For tickets ($10 adults, $8 students and seniors), call 904-2787.
For more information, visit boroshows.com.