Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Co-presented by Tucson Festival of Books and The Loft Cinema

Featuring a live, pre-film discussion with Philip Gefter, award-winning author of the new book, Cocktails with Martha and George: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing at this event at The Loft Cinema. Join the party from 6:00 – 7:00pm for a Cocktails and Mocktails with George and Martha Reception on The Loft Cinema patio, featuring book sales and author mingling, a raffle drawing for books by 2024 festival authors, and a trivia contest! Beverages will be available for sale at the concession stand.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are ideal as malevolent married couple Martha and George in first-time-director Mike Nichols’ searing film adaption of Edward Albee’s groundbreaking play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Taylor won her second Best Actress Academy Award (and New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and British Film Academy Best Actress Awards). Burton matches her as her emotionally spent spouse. And George Segal and Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Sandy Dennis score as a younger couple straying into their destructive path. Martha and George are people chained to their own mediocrity in the halls of academia. When they invite an unwitting new professor (Segal) and his naïve wife (Dennis) over for cocktails one night, the sordid game of verbal invective and elaborate emotional contortions begins, fueled by lust, anger and booze. The movie won a total of five Academy Awards and remains, after more than five decades, a taboo-toppling landmark in cinema. (Dir. by Mike Nichols, 1966, USA, 131 mins., Not Rated)

Philip Gefter is the author of What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography of Richard Avedon; Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, winner of the 2014 Marfield Prize for art writing; and an essay collection, Photography After Frank. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker: Photobooth,  Aperture, and the New York Times, where he was an editor and photography critic for over fifteen years. He also produced the award-wining documentary Bill Cunningham: New York. His latest book is Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?