Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

When they shut down the theater

We were doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

And I mean, we were doing it

We had just finished act one

And the police showed up

And shut the place down

Something about conduct, codes, nonsense

What really happened

Was that the religious nuts who had been picketing us

Finally got their hands on photos of the Mayor

Dressed as Baby Huey

Or something like that

And he agreed to close us

Until we agreed to do appropriate shows

Like The Secret Garden or Hey There Jesus!

Now, I should explain something to you

My father was a vaudeville man

In my family, we didn’t have church

We had show business

And our only tenet was this—

The show goes on

So, there I am onstage

Holding a snifter

Because it’s Albee

Everybody drinks

And back then we really drank

So I’m a little buzzed

And the police come in

And surprisingly

It was not the first time

I’d been in the middle of a theater raid

My father used to open for burlesque acts

And those types of places

Used to get shut down

Every other night

So I wasn’t scared

But the other actors were shaken up

And Beth, our Artistic Director

Got hauled away

When she tried to block the police

And in the process

Ended up socking one of the officers

Right in the jaw

She was my kinda girl

Anyway, the audience didn’t know what to do

But I did

I kept right on going with the play

I don’t believe in stopping a show for anything

I once did an Antony and Cleopatra

Where somebody died in the front row

And as soon as the sheet was over the body

I went right back to groping Marc Antony

Not because I’m disrespectful

But because that motto

That belief—the show goes on

That’s sacred

So I kept going

And the audience stayed where they were

And the policemen tried to hustle everybody out

But nobody moved

Not as any sort of political statement

But because they wanted to see how it all would end

Pretty soon the police sat down too

And when the show was over

They applauded just like everybody else

And then they shut down the theater

Just like they said they would

We reopened a week later

And after that, we had all the audiences we needed

Remember, there’s no such thing as bad publicity

I actually thought I gave my best performance that night

Because all you really need

To turn in a dynamite performance

Is conviction

And that night

I was full of conviction

We all were

My father would have been proud, I’ll tell you that

Somewhere, he was probably clapping up a storm