Theater Review - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Written by Edward Albee

Directed by Pam MacKinnon

Where: Booth Theatre, New York City, NY

When: Wednesday, January 16, 2pm

The liquor is free-flowing in Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and once the booze settles into their systems, the quartet of characters who make up the cast say many things they'll soon regret.  Much like the recently released film Carnage (and, I'd assume, it's basis the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf puts two outwardly civilized couples into a room only to have them prove just how animalistic they can become when circumstances become unfriendly.

Here, we meet Martha and George (Amy Morton and Tracy Letts), both in their late forties/early fifties, who have probably seen better days in their marriage based off of their initial conversations with each other.  George is a history professor at a New England university while Martha's father is the President of the same school.  After a party honoring new faculty members, Martha invites the twentysomething couple Nick and Honey (Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon) over to their home for a nightcap.  Nick was recently hired in the biology department and Martha wants to get to know them better, much to the chagrin of George who just wants to call it a night.  As the two couples sit and chat, their true personalities -- not the overly friendly facades put on at parties -- begin to surface and words are bandied about that probably should have remained unspoken.  

In a play with just four cast members during which most of the performers never leave the stage for three hours, every member of the quartet needs to be strong and this production certainly succeeds in that department.  Tracy Letts is perhaps best known for his writing including the wonderfully creepy Bug (made into a movie starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon) and the critically acclaimed (though incredibly overrated) August: Osage County, but this is my first experience with him as an actor.  His George is outwardly quiet in his Mr. Rogers-style cardigan, but prone to outbursts that increase in more menacing ways as the play progresses.  I will admit that the character took me a bit to get used to (you could tell the simmering anger was just below the surface and you really just wanted it to make an appearance), but by the end, George proves that he's incredibly adept at sneaky manipulation which Letts's tone didn't necessarily suggest at the play's outset.  

Amy Morton's Martha is just as scheming as George, but she never even attempts to hide this quality below the surface.  Instead, Martha here is constantly poking and prodding at her husband, constantly trying to belittle and emasculate him.  And it isn't just her partner whom she twists around under her thumb.  She does the same with their younger guests (as does George) as poor Nick and Honey are forced to join the cruel mind games set forth by the unhappy older couple.

Although the play certainly belongs to Letts and Morton and their vicious tete-a-tetes, Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon absolutely hold their own with Coon in particular making the most of a difficult role that makes her act quite quiet and prudish at the play's beginning, but then shift to a drunken fool as the evening advances.  Playing drunk always runs the risk of coming off seeming fake, but Coon seems to be hilariously accurate in her descent.

While I certainly appreciated the performances from the actors and the dialog from writer Edward Albee (my first experience with this playwright), I found a fundamental flaw after the play concluded that I just couldn't shake.  Why the hell didn't Nick and Honey just walk out the door rather than be berated and essentially used by George and Martha?  There was nothing keeping the younger couple there, so despite there being a bit of an answer given at the play's end as to why they stuck around, I couldn't really buy it.  Still, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was great fun.  The three hours absolutely flew by and I found the play still resonates fifty years after it was first presented.