It’s one of the classic plays in American theater. A portrait of troubled marriages, one old, one new, that shows how love and resentment can accumulate over the years in a ferocious clash of wills.
We’re talking about Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s been revived in an acclaimed production by the Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago, and is currently playing here in Washington at the Arena Stage.
Tracy Letts, widely known as a playwright and the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County, stars as George. Pam MacKinnon directed the show.
JEFFREY BROWN: It’s one of the classic plays in American theater, a portrait of troubled marriages, one old, one new, how love and resentment accumulate over the years in a ferocious class of wills. We’re talking about Edward Albee’s 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Now it’s been revived in an acclaimed production by the Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago and is currently playing here in Washington, D.C., at Arena Stage. Tracy Letts stars as George. Mr. Letts is, of course, wildly known as a playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “August: Osage County.” Pam MacKinnon directed the show, and they both join me know. Welcome to you. I gather that both of you have a fairly long history with both the playwright and the play. Right? Why did you want to take this on now?
TRACY LETTS: It’s a play I’ve known very well my whole life. My father was an English professor, and I remember the play sitting around, the paperback sitting around in my house when I was a kid, and when I first became interested in acting, it’s one of the first things I picked up, just doing the scenes from…
TRACY LETTS: Absolutely. My little, 15-year-old George, my version of George at 15, doing scenes from it in my bedroom when I was a kid. I got a chance to do a production of it a few years ago at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, and I was a bit young for the part, and so when the opportunity came up to do it again, now that I’m really the right age, and to do it with people like Pam and my collaborators at Steppenwolf, I just couldn’t pass it up. It’s an important play in my life, in my development as an artist and a playwright, and so the opportunity to get into it like this was too good to pass up.
PAM MACKINNON: Well, I think that it’s one of those plays that will be done in hundreds of years. It is a true classic. And I’ve been working with Edward Albee now going on 10 years and started working on his more recent plays, and the last two seasons — or I guess three seasons, have dipped back into, I guess, his classic plays, and that’s incredibly exciting to have sort of an ongoing relationship with a writer, and this happens to be one of our greatest writers.
JEFFREY BROWN: I had the chance to talk to him a few years ago, and one of the things we talked about was this play made him famous and then he had to not keep rewriting the same play. When you’re taking it on, something that is, there are so many productions, it’s so well known you almost, seems to me, you have the opposite problem. You have to take on something we all know and make it new in a way. So how do you do it?
PAM MACKINNON: Yeah, I mean at the center of this play, in some respects, a lot of the audience comes to the play having seen Mike Nichols’ movie, and Mike Nichols’ movie is not the play. Perhaps the words are the same, but the location shift in it, and it’s particular tone, and what’s incredibly gratifying is that a lot of audience, especially coming out of our first act, say, Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize this was so funny. And that was not Mike Nichols’ interest, it wasn’t his point of view that he put up there on the screen. That’s very gratifying to me. At the center of it, it’s a love story. It’s a marriage play. There actually is an incredible bond between these two characters.
JEFFREY BROWN: You said you read it early, you must have seen productions, you must have seen the movie. When you’re about to take it on now, do you grab those again and study them or do you shove them to a side?
TRACY LETTS: I shove them aside. I shove them aside and just start at square one and say, Who is this guy? What does he want? Why is he here? Why do I say this line? Why is this word inflected within this line? You just start with the real specific questions about where you are in the given moment, the given circumstances of the play. But no, a lot of the iconic portrayals of this, certainly Burton in the move, that stuff just isn’t helpful to me in a new cast, a new configuration, this director, it’s not helpful to me. It’s nothing against Richard Burton, he’s great in the movie, but my George isn’t that George.
JEFFREY BROWN: I read some reviews that suggested that yours was a more aggressive George, a less passive take than we’re used to from some productions. Does that sound right?
TRACY LETTS: I’ve heard this and I suppose I can understand why people say that, although it’s not as if I set out to do something different than other people had done with it. I did what I hope most actors do; I just sort of saw where I could bring myself to bear in the role as well. But I remember being interviewed by an arts writer in Chicago who was asking me, he said, Well, George is this, George is that. He was sort of listing all the qualities he associated with George. And I said, Well, that’s not my George. That’s now how I view the character. I see him as somebody who’s very actively involved in his relationship, in his relationship with his wife and is actively attempting to make that situation better over the course of the play. For me, it is a very active role and not a passive role at all. He’s the protagonist of the piece.
JEFFREY BROWN: I will not light your cigarette. Walk me through that scene. What were you thinking and what do you want the scene like that to bring out?
PAM MACKINNON: It’s one of the first moments in the play. It feels like a big turn in what kind of evening…
PAM MACKINNON: Yeah, yeah, and it’s George drawing a line. Martha has sprung some late night guests on him, and he goes along for a while, and there’s some host banter, and he even talks one-on-one, has some man talk with Nick, and Martha comes back wearing a different outfit. George knows what kind of evening this is, but there’s a line in the sand now. And it feels like it’s one of the first public — cool, but public confrontations between this couple. And then they keep on escalating from there. But for me, watching that scene, and it’s the freakiest little bit of TV, I mean, it’s such a play to me, but you see you watch it as a TV show, and it’s like what is this? The writing is just so good. And this was Edward Albee’s first full-length play. He wrote it when he was 32. It’s crazy to me. So that’s sort of where I drifted off when I was watching that scene.
JEFFREY BROWN: Right, that’s how we all — where’s the hairline, right? I want to go back to something you said at the beginning here about learning from Albee, because your other hat is playwright hat, right? And here is one of the great playwrights of our — of ever. What did you learn from him and how when you are doing something like this or watching one of his productions, what do you learn from him as a playwright?
TRACY LETTS: I think a lot of it is innate. A lot of it is just being steeped in the language of a purely theatrical writer, of a real dramatist. Mr. Albee has a way of dramatizing very mundane moments, making them dramatic, making them pop, making them interesting and especially humorous for an audience. He has a great, wry sense of humor, sometimes even silly but almost always very smart. And that sense of humor has become such a part of our language in the American theater. Mr. Albee’s sense humor is his identifiably American and theatrical simultaneously. And I think all playwrights, I think we all feel some of his sense of humor in our genetic code, in our DNA somehow, he’s become part of us that sense of humor.
JEFFREY BROWN: And finally, how would you look at his work? You said you’ve worked on a lot of his newer works now, and now going back to some of the classics, the older ones?
PAM MACKINNON: It’s interesting. I think any singular artist maybe has a handful of issues that he or she spends an entire lifetime trying to work through. And what’s interesting, someone who has now lived with a number of his plays, taking a number of his plays to heart, is that the issues remain the same. The obsessive need to answer a few fundamental questions remains the same. His style has shifted. His characters don’t speak at such great lengths. His characters used to be more florid, but their sense of humor, as Tracy said, is still very wry, very front and center. They also sort of do things in a glancing way, like confrontation is done sort of in a sideways way as opposed to dead on. And so there are great similarities. It’s a real voice at work, if a play is 55 years old or written last year, but stylistically it’s interesting to note some changes.
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: One of the most difficult religious and ethical questions facing many communities — and often tearing them apart — is how the public schools should educate children about sex.
Some want a comprehensive approach that recommends abstinence but also covers birth control and disease prevention. Others, especially religious conservatives, want abstinence education only. But some say comprehensive sex ed encourages sexual activity, and others feel the abstinence-only approach results in more pregnancy and disease. Lucky Severson examined the dilemma in Lubbock, Texas.
LUCKY SEVERSON: There is one thing all sides of the heated debate over sex education for kids can agree on — the need.
ADAM HERNANDEZ (Student): I think it is hard being our age and being in high school is hard, just not having sex.
SEVERSON: Every day, the battle over how best to educate kids about sex gets more polarized. This is Marilyn Morris. She runs the country’s largest abstinence-only sex education program, called Aim for Success. Today she’s the invited speaker at the Vines High School Abstinence Club near Dallas.
SEVERSON: Aim represents a rapidly growing movement, strongly promoted by President Bush, that the only solution to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, is total abstinence until marriage. No condoms, no sex.
Ms. MORRIS: I think that you have to understand that what we have been doing in America for all 35 years is encouraging comprehensive sex education. And what that did is encourage sexual activity.
SEVERSON: Vilka Scott Kitching takes an opposite view. She is a disease intervention specialist at the Lubbock, Texas health department, and says she sees too many teens with STDs.
VILKA SCOTT KITCHING (Disease Intervention Specialist, Lubbock Health Department): Time and time again we have people in our clinic who come totally unprepared to face a disease of that nature because nobody had spoken to them about the consequences of starting to have sex without any protection.
Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): Did you know that every single day in our country, 2,305 teenaged girls get pregnant?
SEVERSON: The good news, according to Marilyn Morris, is that the number of teen pregnancies has been coming down — still, over 800,000 teens get pregnant each year. Morris tells the kids she was one of those statistics, and that’s what motivated her to push abstinence only.
Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): If you’re the one it’s happening to, you’d find out like I did, it is a big deal. In fact, it was more like a living nightmare. Here I was, 17. I had all kinds of dreams and goals ahead of me.
SEVERSON: Her message is that abstinence only allows kids to fulfill their dreams without the nightmare of unwanted pregnancy or diseases such as chlamydia.
Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): Are you ready? Here we go, 10th-grade guys (sprays card and it turns red).
ED AINSWORTH (Whiteheart Communications) (Talking to Students): How many of you have watched the television show FRIENDS? Raise your hand.
SEVERSON: Ed Ainsworth is another abstinence-only advocate who lecturers nationwide. These are sixth graders at the Ropesville School near Lubbock, Texas.
First, he ridicules the “sex is okay” culture that surrounds today’s teenagers, including prime-time TV programs like the sitcom, FRIENDS.
Mr. AINSWORTH (Talking to Students): Is that TV show about sex? It is about all of them having as much sex as they can with whoever they want to, right?
Mr. AINSWORTH (Talking to Students): If you have sex outside marriage, it will cost you. It may cost you physically with a pregnancy or a disease. It may cost you mentally and emotionally with your reputation. How you feel about yourself. It may cost you spiritually, and I know with my boundaries I can’t talk to you about the spiritual consequences because we are in school. But believe me, young people, there are tons of spiritual consequences.
SEVERSON: Ropesville, like hundreds of school districts across the country, receives federal funding for programs that are almost exclusively abstinence only. Over the past 5 years, the government has spent more than $800 million on such programs. Schools like Ropesville provide no comprehensive sex education, but invite abstinence-only lecturers like Ainsworth to fill the gap.
Mr. AINSWORTH (Talking to Students): I got up this morning and said, “Lord, all I want is one teenager. All I want is one. Help me change one life and I will be a success today.”
SEVERSON: Ainsworth is legally prohibited from mixing religion with his presentations, but like many on the lecture circuit, Ainsworth comes from an evangelical background and says if the kids are like him and have a close relationship with Christ, they’ll stay sexually pure. He has also been a youth pastor for 27 years.
Mr. AINSWORTH (Speaking in Church): It is the will of God that you abstain from sexual impurity until you are married.
They’ve heard me at school, and then they hear me in a church. They tell me in a church it makes way more, much more sense. Why? Because there’s the power behind the message.
SEVERSON: The message, he says, is one reason fewer teens are giving birth in Lubbock, although teen pregnancy started inching down nationwide before abstinence-only education became popular. Meanwhile, Lubbock has experienced an epidemic of gonorrhea and chlamydia. Lubbock disease specialist Vilka Scott Kitching wouldn’t allow her 12-year-old daughter to attend an Ainsworth class because she says she has seen too many patients who had.
Ms. SCOTT KITCHING: They tell us, “Well, this guy came to school and he said condoms don’t work, so, I didn’t use one. But I was going to have sex anyway, so here I am with one, two, three STDs.” But young people eventually do have sex. I would rather they had more comprehensive information about the subject than just say no to it.
SEVERSON: In 2002, some Lubbock high school students grew so alarmed at the surge of sexually transmitted diseases, they requested more sex education in schools — more comprehensive sex education. They were refused.
ERICA VALES (Student): Like, he didn’t say anything about birth control. He just said the Bible says abstinence is better until marriage — that was in the assembly we took during school. He told us that.
Mr. AINSWORTH: I am not going to promote the use of condoms and those kinds of things, knowing that a student can listen to me and walk out of here and, albeit their choice, go have sex with someone who has AIDS, and use a condom, and die.
DARLENE WORKMAN (School Nurse, Vines High): I spent eight years handing out the protection. And you know what? They’re too young to be mature enough to use it.
SEVERSON: Darlene Workman is the school nurse at Vines High. She came here after quitting her job as a director of a family planning clinic in Michigan, where they taught comprehensive sex education and handed out condoms.
Ms. WORKMAN: One of my students came up to me and said, “Well, Ms. Workman, if you’re handing these out, that means you must think it’s okay for us to participate.” And I never in the world thought it was okay. So what I did was quit.
SEVERSON: One of the first things she did here was start an abstinence-only club. They are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the country. This is David.
DAVID: When condoms are presented as a way to have safe sex and avoid the ramifications, they do encourage teens to have sex.
Ms. VALES: Well, it will encourage some people, but it will prevent a lot of pregnancies. Or even just telling girls about birth control. Because nobody ever talks about birth control.
SEVERSON: A recent congressional study cast some doubt on the effectiveness of federally funded abstinence-only programs. The study found scientific inaccuracies in many of the textbooks, which, for instance, quote a much higher failure rate of condoms than is the case.
One textbook states that the HIV virus can be transmitted through tears, sweat, and saliva. Not true. Marilyn Morris says the study was biased and politically motivated.
Ms. MORRIS: Because I think they are people who are very, maybe, antireligious. And they looked at the abstinence message as a religious message. But for us, at Aim for Success, it is a health issue.
SEVERSON: Another study found that 88 percent of kids who had taken an abstinence pledge admitted having sexual intercourse before marriage, and that teens who contracted STDs were less likely to realize they had a disease.
Ms. SCOTT KITCHING: The more knowledge you have on the subject, the more equipped you are to handle that subject. If you look at studies in other countries, in Europe where sex education is comprehensive, you can see clearly that their rates are lower than ours.
Ms. WORKMAN: That says we have a lot of work to do. It doesn’t say that we should hand out condoms, to me, at all. I think the churches need to get together. I think the community needs to get together. I think the parents need to take up to the plate — stand up to the plate and take some action here.
SEVERSON: For some kids, the debate and the dilemma come down to this. Can moral arguments persuade them to avoid sex until marriage, or if they’re taught about condoms and safe sex, does that encourage them to have sex? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle?
ABERNETHY: Although major studies are in progress, there are as yet no generally accepted data on the consequences of comprehensive versus abstinence-only sex education.
Statement by Wade F. Horn, Dept. of Health and Human Services, on abstinence education programs, Feb. 16, 2004
Baptist Press: "Studies: Abstinence message, religion shape teen behavior" by Michael Foust, May 13, 2003
Washington Post: "Some abstinence programs mislead teens, report says" by Ceci Connolly, Dec. 2, 2004
The developers of Curious Expedition have had a heady winter. After their devlog landed on TigSource , the two-person team won a €50,000 grant from the German government to finish developing the game, an exploration roguelike inspired by pioneers and the fiction of Jules Verne. Riad Djemili and Johannes Kistmann then left their day jobs at Yager Development—where they worked on Spec Ops: The Line —to work full-time on Curious Expedition and bring it to retail.
The game's hook is undeniable: explorers will set out across a randomly generated continent in search of treasure and knowledge, and the slightest misstep will result in a dead or insane expedition party and a failed excursion. This is a game where Nikola Tesla might shoot an energy gun at a giant crab or a hired hand will go insane and steal precious supplies on his way out of camp.
What we didn't know before now is that Curious Expedition is being developed to be playable in-browsers through HTML5. It's an enormously risky move by Djemili and Kristmann, as it will force them to educate players that browser games don't have to be low quality, casual Flash games. According to Kristmann, “We just need to get players to take a look at the game; that will be our chance to convince them that it's an actual game and not one of those other abominations... Can we convince the hardcore players that browser games can be more than what they currently are?”
We caught up with the team on the afternoon after they began the process of incorporating their company, something that makes the whole thing "feel very real" to them. They discussed the dangers of setting a game in a time when colonialism and racism were common, and their decision to include equal numbers of male and female explorers.
Riad Djemili: We want to release our first buyable alpha already in three or four months. Not just for financial reasons, but mainly to get feedback from the players as soon as possible. Its a pretty unusual game, so we're curious to find out what the players think.
RD: We're leaving that decision open. So far we're developing it as a browser game and will try to monetize it directly. A packaged steam build could be very possible though. It's still unusual to have core-games that are playable in a browser.
Johannes Kristmann: We kinda started with the tech just to do quick prototyping, but never really hit a border with it. So we just stuck with it. The advantages are very nice.
RD: We're curious to see how that facilitates new gameplay/sharing options, like putting Wikipedia links into the descriptions of characters or items. You could also directly post to Facebook from your highscore table. Or share your unique diary with your friends, just with a click, without them having to download anything.
JK: It's also so nice to just have access to it everywhere—I mean during production, we can have it on a webserver hidden somewhere and just access the latest version. Later, when playing the game, you'll be able to play at home, drive to work, and pick up your session at work over lunchbreak.
JK: [laughs] It'll definitely support those kind of quick sessions. I'm not saying it'll be easy to stop, but…
RD: Maybe we could even do crazy stuff like allowing you to embed a high score widget for your player account on your website.
The perception is that browser-based games are free, not very good, and not very serious. But that's not really fair because of the power that HTML5 has over old browser games built in Flash or Java. Have you guys heard any feedback like that? Or are you worried about that?
RD: Absolutely—mostly from ourselves. We're very aware that we're trying to break the mold here. I think this is going to change in the coming future, but it's definitely a risk to be on the forefront of this. We don't have a lot of other games that we can take as a blueprint in this regard.
JK: That's probably one of the biggest challenges—standing out from the browser game crowd and making people understand that we are a quite different browser game.
RD: That makes it exciting, but also scary honestly. I hope that our game is that good, that it can become a groundbreaker in that regard.
JK: It's hard because people are so used to not paying for browser games. The question is more if we can convince the hardcore players that browser games can be more than what they currently are.
RD: There is also the option of pre-packaging the game and making it playable as a regular, offline desktop game. I think we'll probably end up doing both. Kinda like Minecraft. You can play that online, but if you want to have that feeling of ownership and security, you can also download it and have it on your desktop. That's also something we'll learn from the alpha. As soon as the players get their hands on it, they can tell us how they prefer to play it.
You recently spent a lot of time adding female characters during your “ FemCrunch .” Why do you think it is important to have equal representation in the game's characters?
JK: We knew we wanted to have female explorers, but never really spent more than a minimum effort on it. If you read the blog article you'll know the background. [Editor's note: After watching Anita Sarkeesian's video on female characters , Kristmann realized that Marie Curie, the only playable female character, was the token woman in a game full of men.] But once we started researching on female personalities of our time period, it was so easy to see why we needed them. There are so many great stories about female explorers I had never heard about, and now being able to put them into the game and potentially make more people aware of those women is a great opportunity for us. Also, when playing the game now with the diverse cast, it just feels so good to have all those characters.
RD: I think you always have responsibility as a creator, in general, to think about what values and messages you're putting out there. Especially since we're in a semi-realistic setting. So we take that seriously. In the way women are portrayed and also how the native people are portrayed. That doesn't mean that we're force-spooning a certain message though, just that we're conscious about what we put in the game and what we don't.
There are some very ugly currents of colonialism that run through this time period. It's a delicate place to work.
RD: Yes, absolutely. Again, not entirely risk-free from backlash from the community, but we think its a interesting scenario and valid for games to also touch on political-cultural issues.
JK: We also just cannot not have it in the game. If we'd leave that aspect out, we'd whitewash, which is a horrible thing to do.
RD: Yeah, the question would have been to do the setting at all. Not if we also put in the negative aspects.
RD: We have a little experience on how that works with Spec Ops: The Line . That was already inspired by Heart of Darkness . Now we're doing it again with a smaller indie title.
JK: It's just surprising how extremely different the reactions to our game can be. Some people do not see at all the racist subcontext, while others are immediately offended. There is a huge gap between how this time period is perceived, and that's where we potentially could initiate a reflective process in some players.
2U 12G 24-bay JBOF (just a bunch of flash), comes with 24 2.5” hot-swap drive bays to support NVMe PCIe U.2 drives