Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
I knew that this was going to be intense. I had invited friends to see it with me, and we had seats in the middle of the front row, south side of the "theatre in the square" at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre. After Michelle Polgar had dedicated the opening night's performance to the memory of Oscar Brockett, that grand old man of Austin theatre, the lights began to fade and I had a feeling similar to that you get when you light the fuse on a fistful of firecrackers and throw them down.
My usual view is that a cinema version of the text is irrelevant to the stage performance, but here I have to admit that in any staging of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the ghost of Richard Burton and the presence of Elizabeth Taylor roil fitfully about the set. The movie rating code had just been instituted when Mike Nichols' film was released in 1966. The MPAA had relented after a couple of minor revisions of the dialogue and gave it a "suggested for mature audiences" rating. In my town meant that you had to be 18 years of age to get in, unless accompanied by a parent. My father, a secret movie buff, insisted that I see it and he stood behind me as my 17-year-old self bought my ticket.
Thirteen Academy award nominations, including for Nichols as director and all four in the cast, with five wins, including Taylor as the monstrous Martha and Sandy Dennis as an unforgettably inebriated bubble-blowing little wife. So how can a contemporary theatrical production stand up to that?
The answer in Austin is simple but three-fold: by playing to an audience predominantly of college students who do not know the film; by enlisting Babs George for the role of Martha and Ev Lunning Jr. for the role of George; and with Christie Moore's tight direction in Leilah Stewart's starkly effective, almost claustrophobic set.
Burton and Taylor in this film were artists of contempt and menace, married to one another in real life. Nichols' film was one of jagged edges that kicked past the current bounds of cinema propriety. The St. Ed's staging is just as powerful, with each character vividly on the edge in some fashion, but it is unexpectedly comic. Albee's savage dialogue took the audience by surprise, time and time again, and one wonders if director and players had foreseen those reactions. They adapted immediately and with impeccable timing, never leaving their characters, and they had the fascinated audience giddy and on the edge of their seats.
Recap: George is a shambling history professor, married for fifteen years to Martha, the boozy middle-aged daughter of the president of the New England college where he teaches. We meet them at home sometime after midnight as they're returning from a faculty party and we hear them wrangling -- Martha with sour and often vicious gibes at her husband, George with the mute restlessness of a bear who may take action at any moment. It turns out that at Daddy's party Martha invited the new faculty member Nick and his mild, perky blonde wife Honey to come by the house for a drink afterward. And we set out for a long, long night that gradually reveals more about each of the four than any of them wishes to share.
Scene designer Leilah Stewart has cannily enclosed the usually fly-away space of the Mary Moody Northen Theatre. Its four runways at intermediate points of the compass are choked off -- northwest and northeast by conventional doorways, including a front door kept closed much of the time, southwest with a bookcase behind George's desk, and southeast with a fireplace where Daddy's photo is displayed on the mantle. Upper spaces at those points do not exist in the world of the set, except perhaps as gaps giving way to the lost firmament above.
Babs George often plays appealingly quizzical characters, but here with the big voice, the scorn and the East Coast assertive accent she appears to have grown taller by a foot or more -- displaying an ample bosom not as evident in earlier characters. Her Martha has the sharp-edged intelligence of a supreme frustration and the bleak outlook of a refugee. Lunning as her husband George has a steadiness and slow burn that seem both quenched and encouraged by the sloshing amounts of scotch that he consumes. Martha is a gin drinker, supplied with dangerous attention and politeness by her husband. As events develop, Lunning's George does not spit with the Welsh arrogance of Burton; instead, he builds with withering intensity an an interpretation of himself, his guests and Martha that has the inescapability of a nest of razor wire.
St. Ed's has long used Actor's Equity members onstage, working with and challenging its student actors. I'd had misgivings about a four-character play in which two pros face two undergraduates. But it works, both because of the intergenerational conflict within the play -- burnt-out faculty couple against newly-recruited young Ph.D. and tender wife -- but also because senior Kel Sanders and junior Meredith Montgomery have the presence and talent to carry it off.
In the course of this lost evening the characters consume a vast amount of hard liquor, but only Honey shows any sign of inebriation. Her disappearance into the bathroom and Martha's tending of her are a convenient plot turn, leaving Lunning and Sanders together for some boy talk. Montgomery's performance as the drunken Honey is amusing and moving, particularly as she creates Honey's fuzzy attention and bafflement. I would have preferred to witness more fatigue and slurring toward the end as those characters bring out their metaphorical knives. Instead, Christi Moore and her cast have created three hard drinkers condemned to retain fluency of invective and imagination without losing visions of disaster.
At the end -- and it is the end of something precious -- with Martha motionless and plaintive, George calm, reassuring and merciless, we feel a deep sympathy for these terrible, haunted characters.
It's a remarkable evening, not to be missed.
Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, November 15
Review by Robert Faires for the Austin Chronicle, November 18
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, November 19
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
