Who's Amused by Virginia Woolf?

I was in New York for work and saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway. It had been years since I’d seen a Broadway show, but I figured, what the hell. What else was I going to do on a frigid Friday night? I did like the play. It was not as great as the movie but then again, the play did not feature the corpses of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton so maybe it’s an unfair comparison.

What struck me most if how the audience members found so much of it funny, at least in act one. Until George breaks a bottle and the show starts getting darker, people were yukking it up. Edward Albee’s play is of course darkly funny but when I saw the movie, I didn’t think it was ha-ha funny. Yet everyone was laughing.

How much do our preconceptions and cues and fellow audience members influence our perception of art?

I had always read about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a dark, twisted drama so I responded to the movie as such. But on some Broadway website, I saw the play marketed as a comedy. So did people go in expecting some laugh-a-thon and respond accordingly? “Husband and wife drink themselves into cirrhosis and pretend they have a child and then kill off the child just to fuck with another couple.” Fun for the whole family!

There was no laugh track for the movie, of course, so there was no comic relief when George and Martha started needling one another. It was all just deliciously nasty and the whole movie played out like an evening that was interminable and uncomfortable. At the play, one person laughs and it becomes infectious. The audience members were not wrong. They just cast the events of Virginia Woolf in a different light for me. 

A lot of people really hate live studio audiences for TV but I never minded them. The common refrain is “I hate being told when to laugh” but I see TV shows with studio audiences as more like watching a play. Fellow audience members can laugh and reveal a joke that you might have missed. One person laughs and then everybody else is laughing and it’s just fun and harmless and a great way to kill a Friday night.