Project 1- Casting and Characters.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee is a play where the casting would not be difficult. When looking at things like age, gender, ethnicity/race, or persons with disabilities, many factors would not encroach on the author’s intention.

Age is an important aspect in this play as there are two couples; one of which are older, and the other younger. While it would be a simple fix to drop facial features and age the actors who play George and Martha, you would definitely need to look at how the four compare onstage. In a collegiate, and academia setting the casting who have to, or course, use four actors of, or around, the same age. Therefore, the age of the characters is not a predominate factor in regards to casting.

When discussing gender, one really does need to look at the relationships of these characters in relation to the other people in the play, as well as the families from which they are reared. To begin with Martha’s father is the head of the college, and Nick works there. Therefore, Martha could not be a lesbian, because it would not fit correctly into her family image. At the same time, Martha tells George that he doesn’t have the brains to work at the college; the playwright uses obvious degradation to inform the audience of the relationship of the George and Martha. The two create an ambiance of disfunctionality that is so prominent in this piece. And, it would not work for Nick and Honey (the younger couple) almost have like a tutor, tutee relationship with George and Martha.

It would be interesting to see the characters played by different races/ethnicities. However, due to Martha speaking down to George, what message would it send if Martha was Caucasian and George was African American? Also, would having Honey (a woman who faked a pregnancy in order to get married to Nick) be African American, Hispanic, or some other minority send a message of dishonesty and pre-marital pregnancy that would come across wrong to the audience? If one was to go with non-traditional casting as far as race/ethnicity one would need to cast people of all the same race/ethnicity.

This play, while not necessarily avoiding persons with disabilities, it would not necessarily be the proper piece to showcase any person with a disability. That is not to say that cast members cannot have slight disabilities (half blind, half deaf), they just can’t be completely debilitated due to the amount of physical activity George and Martha exhibit.

So, when thinking about non-traditional casting in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf one must think carefully if they wanted to try to cast this in a non-traditional manner.