Word: martha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Martha, the character who climaxes a series of vicious Edward Albee heroines, Elizabeth Taylor can't quite hold her own. At times she hits just the right note --physically she has made herself ideal for the part--but her portrayal lacks modulation: she is too loud throughout...
While in the play Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen had a relatively equal impact on the audience, Burton as Martha's husband George takes over completely. The only possible complaint about his performance is that it makes the others look excessively pedestrian by contrast...
Albee, America's current master of theatrical invective, uses it here for potshots and heavy artillery in a marital Armageddon. His chief combatants are a pair of matched failures: George is an ineffectual, hagridden history professor; his wife Martha is the university president's daughter-a bitchy, aging man-eater with a father fixation and a casual lust for younger chaps. The entertainment takes shape very late one evening when a new young faculty couple stops by for a nightcap. "Give your coats and stuff to sourpuss," snarls Martha, and the foursome is off on an orgy...
Broadway Director Mike Nichols, in his first movie job, can claim a sizable victory simply for the performance he has wrung from Elizabeth Taylor. Looking fat and fortyish under a smear of makeup, with her voice pitched well below the belt, Liz as Martha is loud, sexy, vulgar, pungent, and yet achieves moments of astonishing tenderness. Only during sustained eruptions does she lapse into monotony, or look like an actress play-acting animosity instead of feeling it. As the ambitious young prof whose blueprint for success includes "plowing a few pertinent wives," George Segal exudes callow opportunism assuredly. And Broadway...
...screen or stage, Author Albee's catalogue of the games people play tends to become repetitive, larded with Freudian case history, and building to a fairly preposterous climax. When George and Martha agree to lay to rest the ghost of their nonexistent teen-age son, there is solemn talk about the sterility of illusions, but the real issue appears to be a playwright's need to make his verbal fireworks add up to something...