Seize Whos Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Edited By Edward Albee Categorized In Paper Copy
وجود اینکه ما موجوداتی اجتماعی هستیم اما در شرایط خاصی ممکن است کاملا غیراجتماعی بشویم. اخلاق را کنار بگذاریم و مثل اجداد بدویمان رفتارهایی نشان بدهیم که فقط از یک نئاندرتال برمیآید. به خودتان نگیرید لطفا. اما میدانم که اجتماعی بودن متشخص بودن و رفتارهای همراه با شعور ممکن است تا جایی همراهمان باشد و بعد در وضعیتی ویژه تغییر کنیم. آدمهای این نمایشنامه البته فقط تا جایی و تنها چند قدمی از آن چهرههای خندان با نور ملایمی از شعور اجتماعی دور شدند. ممکن است ما هم یک روز در حضور مهمانانمان چنین کارهایی انجام بدهیم.
در این کتاب بیشتر از داستان کاراکترها مجذوبتان میکنند. این آدمها را احتمالا نمیشود به راحتی هر جایی پیدا کرد. به سختی میشود گفت که منم همینطورم! چقدر شبیه من بود. نمیشود با آنها همذاتپنداری کرد. شکستن مرزها شاید برجستهترین ویژگی این نمایشنامه برای من باشد. فضایی که در آن آدمها از قالبهایشان بیرون میآیند و چیزی میشوند که در درونیترین پوستهشان وجود دارد. راستش همین رفتارها بددهنیها و فحشها و واکنش شخصیتها بود که من را تا آخر نمایشنامه با خود کشاند و برد. This is, in my opinion, the best play ever written in theth century, There's also a great story about how this was the first drama rejected by the Pulitzer Prize committee for "obscenity" you may have a hard time finding the obscenity in it, though, since it's from.
It's basically about two married couples who hang out in the wee hours of the morning following a party on a college campus in New England, but the interesting part is the way one couple tries to screw with the other's minds for their own personal enjoyment.
There's waaay more to it than that, but I'll save it for my students, Lots of symbolism, historical references and absurdist influences and a surprise ending, By the way, like many plays, it's not the greatest "read" to really do it justice, you have to see it perfromed.
I recommend thefilm version directed by Mike Nichols, starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton,
Maybe this shouldn't be on GoodReads, I wish there was a site called GoodPlays or something, A threeact play about the illusions that sustain two couples, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf follows the aging George and Martha as they entertain and terrorize the recently married Nick and Honey one night after the end of a university faculty party.
The evening starts off on an unpleasant note in the former couple's home, and the situation only further deteriorates as the increasingly intoxicated small group stumbles toward dawn.
Albee's acerbic wit is at its strongest here, and in contrast to many of his plays, the plot rarely feels tedious or drawn out.
.stars
“Like the moon shining bright
Up high with all its grace,
I can only show you at night
And hide half of my face.
”
Ana Claudia Antunes, sitelinkPierrot amp Columbine
“Like European Absurdists, Albee has tried to dramatize the reality of mans condition, but whereas Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, and Pinter present reality in all its logical absurdity, Albee has been preoccupied with illusions that screen man from reality.
”
I bought this one at a thrift store back at a time when I hadn't read any of Virginia Woolf, so the title took me unguarded and the book resided on my shelf for too long.
I then read Her and brought up the courage to read this, The play is disappointing in that aspect, You don't need to read Her to devour this one, Albee initially had thought of the title to be “The Exorcism” the title later assigned to Actbut arrived at “Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf” after discovering the phrase as graffiti in a Greenwich Village bar.
Albee has explicated his title with its reference to the wordsmith centrally concerned with the nature of reality, to mean “ Who is afraid of facing life without illusions”
Disappointed as I was, it was a pretty amazing read in itself.
Asked to describe his work in progress that would become “Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, Edward Albee claimed his work to be a “sort of grotesque comedy” concerning that deals with “the substitution of artificial for real values in this society of ours.
” That does sound quite a mouthful, but really is drastically appropriate,
“Dashed hopes and good intentions, Good, better, best, bested. ”
There are two dysfunctional families in the play, a total of four characters: For me, two are absolutely disgusting, one demands sympathy but doesn't deserve it, and one probably will remind you at times of the irksome element which is present in every family tale.
The similarity of the families is they reciprocate the roles in a lovehate relationship, The contradiction is that while the older one interacts acerbically amongst themselves while in others' company and a bit warmly when left alone, probably the process is reversed for the other couple.
The second one, or so the play suggests gets unknowingly involved with the previous one in a Game, A harrowing, dark one.
“You want to dance with me, angel tits”
The storyline feels way too modern, for something being written in the backdrop of thes.
The four characters here constitute a miniature society, and everything that happens in the play is way too relevant in the present time.
Complaints of increasingly frightening feelings of selfestrangement and depersonalization are very frequently voiced by the individuals entrapped in collusion, That happened back at that time, and that happens even now, I don't reckon it won't make much of a movie if the speech is garbled, for the complementary Watzlawick conversation is the best part of this play.
Strangely depressing and diminishing in parts, but yet, probably for the best,
Anything more will act as a spoiler, So read this book. It is way too dark for a play, just hope you are not deceived,
“You don't see anything, do you You see everything but the goddamn mind you see all the little specs and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you” This is, quite simply, one of my all time favourite plays.
There is a film version, with Burton and Taylor as the two main characters, and while this isnt a bad version and it is in glorious black and white I think that film struggles with words and this is a wordy play.
And then there is that bizarre scene when they leave the house which makes no sense at all
I first read this play in high school and had to do a reading of the play in front of the class.
Naturally, I was Nick, as the teacher was George, There is a nice fact that Albee is supposed to have said he had no idea of the significance of calling his major characters George and Martha and definitely did not mean any reference to the first President of the United States and his missus.
I find this a little hard to believe either way, fate has stepped in and this fact remains, intentional or otherwise.
I've always thought it adds something interesting to the play,
This might as well be two plays, On the surface there is a couple who look like they are about to tear each other apart, This reads like a moments before the divorce play and you would be stretched to find a play in which there are deeper feelings of hostility or more savage attacks between a married couple.
But this is only on a surface level, The depth of affection and love between George and Martha is really the point of the play the games they play are quite literally played so as to keep each other sane.
And this is not the only contradiction between our initial impressions and reality, Honey has there ever been a more perfect name comes across at the start of the play as a mousey little moron of a wife, who puffs up with child to get her hands on a husband only to deflate again once the ring is on her finger.
To look at her you might think she was completely incapable of sustaining a pregnancy and that this is the point but actually, her life is spent having to drink brandy never mix, never worry to end a constant string of pregnancies.
This, of course, stands in stunning contrast to Martha, who comes across as the earth mother but in reality is incapable of having children.
George comes across as a pathetic creature at the start of the play, unable to satisfy his wife who considers him so ineffectual that she doesn't even pretend to hide her flirtations with other men but by the end we realise that he has completely controlled all of the action in the entire play and everything that has happened has happened due to his choices and his decisions.
There are possibly few modern plays with a more God like character, More than this, everything that happens, happens due to his great love of Martha something that seems incomprehensible at the start of the play as they are tearing strips off each other.
I went to see this play a year or so ago and was almost reduced to tears towards the end.
The older I get the more I find that the sorts of things that are most likely to make me want to cry are not the sorts of things that might have had that affect on me when I was young.
Then I would have been just as likely to have become upset over unrequited love or such something I
find a little dull now.
Today I find what is almost too painful to handle is love that is based on a deep acceptance of who we are if someone can love us for our scars, for ourselves warts and all I am almost invariably reduced to tears.
At the end of sitelinkTherapy when the main character kisses the mastectomy scar of what had been his childhood sweetheart I was virtually a blubbering mess.
But of course, such love only exists in fiction and that is, perhaps, its main role,
Fortunately, Im too much of a boy to be caught crying in theatres particularly over plays I know quite so well as I know this one I must have read it a dozen times over the years.
All the same, watching Gary McDonald recite the requiem mass at the end of the play as Martha realises that her son is truly dead and must remain so for them to continue to have any access to him at all was as close as I would like to be to tears in a grossly public place.
This is a truly devastating play, a play that shines and shines, a work of sheer power and genius.
It is also one of the funniest plays Ive ever seen, I dont think it is possible to love this play any more than I do,
نمایشنامه خیلی خیلی عجیبی بود روراست اگر با سعید همخوانی نکرده بودم و نظرات اونو نمیشنیدم برداشتم ازش خیلی ناقص باقی می موند. سعید نظریه بازی ها رو مطرح کرد و من از بعد اجتماعی سعی کردم دیدگاهم رو توضیح بدم. از چیزی که تصورش رو داشتم عجیب تر پر حرف تر بود این کار. با این وجود من دوستش نداشتم و باهاش ارتباط برقرار نکردم. قطعا کار خیلی خیلی خاصیه اما بمن فرصت نفس کشدن و فکر کردن نمیداد. تمام تحلیل ها هم با فاصله گرفتن ازش به ذهنم رسید.
کاری نیست که دوباره بخونم یا پیشنهاد کنم. اما اگر خواستید بخونیدش حتما تجربه خاصی خواهید داشت. George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf
Martha: I am, George, I am.
Martha: Truth or illusion, George you don't know the difference,
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did,
Martha: Amen.
The fiftieth anniversary production of the play, which is one of the greatest plays ever written, a masterpiece of the theater.
sitelink playbill. com/video/highli
The story of an important night in the lives of two academic couples, George and Martha, older, and Nick and Honey, new to the small college.
Their meeting takes place after a drunken faculty party, very late, and goes on all night til dawn, The showcase here is the older couple, who treat each other both viciously and amusingly, They use language to maim each other, but also to amuse each other, They invent “games” such as Get the Guest or Hump the Host, through which they hurt each other, but also hurt their guests.
But do they love each other Can they heal
And alcohol is present on every page, they never stop drinking:
“.
. . we cry, and we take our tears, and we put 'em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays until they're all frozen and then.
. . we put them in our drinks. ”
So it all appears initially to be uselessly mean, cleverly drunken chatter, but theres a method in the madness, to get beneath the small talk to the meaning of life, what they need to keep their relationships alive and thriving: To do away with surface chatter and really live and love each other.
To shatter the illusions through which they have been living, If possible.
Honey: Apologetically, holding up her brandy bottle I peel labels,
George: We all peel labels, sweetie and when you get through the skin, all three layers, through the muscle, slosh aside the organs An aside to Nick, them which is still sloshableBack to Honey and get down to bone.
. . you know what you do then
Honey: Terribly interested No!
George: When you get down to bone, you haven't got all the way, yet.
There's something inside the bone, . . the marrow and that's what you gotta get at, A strange smile at Martha
Whos afraid of Virginia Woolf They all are, and we all are, And to not be afraid How do we achieve that For that, George and Martha in particular, though Nick and Honey, too, need a Walpurgisnacht, a kind of bloodletting and a violent tearing away of illusions to get to the core of their relationship.
And this is the very night when it all goes down, and it isnt always fun, it can be brutally painful, but it can also be exhilarating theater.
Heres one moment of recognition and clarity for Martha:
"George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them.
Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, And yes, I do wish to be happy, George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad, Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest for having seen me and having said: Yes, this will do.
Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving, . . me, and must be punished for it, George and Martha Sad, sad, sad. "
A kind of symbol for both couples of the illusions they need to face down is the mention of a nonexistent child, powerfully and almost surreally, tragicomically, present throughout.
There was nothing quite like it in theater before it, and many were since influenced by it, by Albee, I recommend your seeing a production, of course, including the great Academy Awardwinning film with Richard Burton, Liz Taylor who, having been married and divorced three times understood epic marital conflict, George Segal and Sandy Dennis, which I saw again in awe.
.