The author of the brilliant one-woman show I Got Sick, Then I Got Better, has a few things to say about midlife marriage.
Theatergoers know only the hair-raising marital Sturm und Drang of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? However, the following manuscript pages—recently discovered in a trash can outside the playwright’s house by an enterprising dramaturgy grad student—suggest that Albee had originally planned a fourth act of the now-classic play, an act that returns George and Martha to the humdrum existence of an ordinary couple.
[Morning. George and Martha are in their living room, cleaning up glasses and full ashtrays after the previous evening’s debacle, the worst get-together in the history of man.]
George: I thought they’d never leave.
Martha: Tell me about it. Honey, where are all the empty vodka bottles?
George: I put them in the trash.
Martha: In the recycling bin?
George [Wearily]: Yes, in the recycling bin.
[Martha exits stage right, into the kitchen, and returns.]
Martha: They’re in the returnables bin. Returnables are different from recyclables. You can’t return vodka bottles. Returnables are soda cans, and you get five cents. Recyclables get recycled. I don’t know why I have to say this every single day.
The act continues in this vein, with Martha exiting offstage to run the dishwasher, and George remarking that running the dishwasher only half full is not exactly in keeping with Martha’s desire to live green. Martha finds that George has not screwed the top tightly enough onto the opened bottle of tonic and there is no fizz left. “Now we have to throw it away,” she says, not failing to add, “in the returnables bin.” George notices that Martha is whistling absentmindedly and asks her to stop, as she knows it annoys him. And so on. The act is unfinished, possibly because Mr. Albee was boring himself to death.
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Happy couples, unhappy couples, couples in between, it doesn’t matter—everybody asks: Could you please fold the empty grocery bags and put them away instead of leaving them all over the kitchen? Could you please use a coaster, would you mind putting the half-and-half back in the refrigerator, would you please lower the volume on the TV during the commercials? Could you please, please, please not do that thing you do?
