A holiday flight to Los Angeles, the usual industry contingent in evidence, and Courtney B. Vance, a friendly acquaintance, notices that I’m reading the galleys of Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He and his wife, Angela Bassett, he tells me, had at one point toyed with the idea of doing Edward Albee’s play together, but worried about the strain it could put on their marriage.
Anyone who has seen the work that first carpet-bombed American cultural complacency in 1962 would know what he meant. Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill starred in the original Broadway production, which so shocked, shocked, Kennedy-era polite society that it ran for 664 performances and won a Tony and almost a Pulitzer, until a voter vetoed it over its “filthy language.”
