"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Pak Han

Edward Albee is dead. Long live Edward Albee. Or at least, his plays. I haven't seen that many of them (yet), but the ones I have seen are (at the risk of a little redundancy) bitingly incisive. He had a knack for digging into the dark recesses of modern life and then exposing them, with some unkind twists thrown in. He could be cruelly humorous, laying bare the hypocrisies and little white lies that are so necessary to daily life.

This Play

This is the fifth of the five plays in Shotgun's season. For once, I'm reviewing one of their plays close to the opening, when you still have plenty of time to see it ("Woolf" runs through November 13, and then will join the other four plays from the season in repertory through January. So you have lots of chances to see it. And (spoiler!) you should.

The four characters in the play are two married couples: one middle-aged, the other younger. In each case the husband is a professor at the small New England college in town. After a faculty party, the couples meet up to continue the evening at the older couple's home. There is much drinking and games of various kinds are played. They are not fun games. It's more like extreme, do-it-yourself couples' therapy, while drunk.

It's long (3 hours; 2 intermissions), but so engaging it doesn't feel that long. It's intense, but often quite funny. It's dark, and not happy, but not tragic, either. Moral and emotional ambiguity and ambivalence abound. The themes are very adult, even if some of the behavior is quite childish. This is definitely a play for grown-ups.

The Performances

As with all the Shotgun plays this season, the staging is simple: a single room in the home of George and Martha. There is no furniture, just a bar. The actors sit either on the floor or on the edge of the stage, giving the audience a real feeling of being right on top of or inside the action (which is not a comfortable place to be!). The costumes and music give a good sense of the period (early 1960s), and indeed the soundtrack contributes to the sense of being trapped that permeates much of the play.

As the senior couple, George and Martha, David Sinaiko and Beth Wilmurt are wonderfully nasty to one another, sniping and snarking from the moment they enter. Nick and Honey, the younger couple, are quite nicely played by Josh Schell and Megan Trout. Megan in particular brings both comedy and real depth to Honey, who is probably the least intrinsically interesting of the characters as written. All of the actors manage to pull off the descent into drunkenness pretty effectively, though I think Martha could be a little more convincing at it.

But all of the characters come vividly to life: You know all of these people, somewhere, somehow. You've met them or worked with them. Or if you're very unlucky, you live with them. The little digs at the start of the evening are all too easy and familiar, and as the night wears on and the booze flows, the inhibitions and the facades fall away, unmasking some real, deep issues in all of the characters and their relationships. It's not a bad idea to freshen your drink at each intermission.

Overall

The play works really well for me on at least two levels. One, it's obviously a masterpiece of writing, and the minimalist staging doesn't put anything in the way of that. The terrific acting brings out the subtlety that underlies the plain language. This is a production that is only going to get better as it goes on and the actors get more comfortable in their characters and in the story. I look forward to seeing it again in a few weeks to see how it has matured.

Two, it is a wonderful follow-on to a couple of the earlier plays in the season, particularly "The Village Bike," which deals (in very different ways) with the relationships of married couples and how they deal with expectations, roles, and disappointments, and "Caught" which is largely about truth and honesty and how you define them, hide them, and find them. I think it will be very interesting to see how these plays work off each other as they move through the repertory season to come.

There's going to be a lot to think and talk about for the next few months at the Ashby Stage. Pull up a drink and let's have at it!