"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at Oakland Theater Project

 

Oakland Theater Project production photo by Ben Krantz

This is a play I like, though it's often tough to watch. I saw it multiple times a few years ago at Shotgun Players, so got a good feel for the text. I really need to see the film version, given my recent exposure to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in another context.

Anyway, this show falls in the category of plays that are rather unpleasant to watch, but the writing is so good and so insightful that it's worth watching four people's lives implode before you.

The Play

I don't have a lot to add to what I said about the play when I saw it at Shotgun in 2016, except to say that I appreciate the writing even more now. Edward Albee crafted this play brilliantly, and it still holds up now, sixty years later.

The Production

This being Oakland Theater Project, the house is small, so it's a pretty intimate experience. The set by Dina Zarif is simple, but evokes the atmosphere of a mid-century modern design. It's stark and white and rectilinear with steps and informal seating. And of course, the bar, right in the center. I quite liked the mirror behind the bar as a statement, both about the period and about the nature of the play.

Two things I note about the casting: One, during Albee's lifetime, he insisted that all the characters in the play were white, and therefore must be played by white actors. I gather his estate has eased up on that, as both of the men in this cast are black. I think that opens up the dynamics of the characters in interesting ways, and I'm glad to see that theaters are now allowed to explore these matters (and give the opportunity to play these amazing characters to actors previously excluded). Two, in the Shotgun production, all four actors were people I know quite well, so there was always some cognitive dissonance in seeing them play these quite extreme roles. Seeing the play again with actors I don't know, I had a different level of distance from them, and was able to interrogate the roles differently. So that was interesting.

All in all, I thought the play was well done. It's a very difficult text, but director Michael Socrates Moran does a good job of keeping the action where it needs to be. All four actors (Lisa Ramirez as Martha, Adrian Roberts as George, Wera von Wulfen as Honey, and William Hodgson as Nick) did a solid job, drifting steadily into intoxication. I've been really impressed with Roberts' work lately, having seen him in OTP's The Tempest last year (pre-blog revival) and mere weeks ago in Aurora's Cyrano.

The Bottom Line

I really like the play, and OTP's little black-box garage space works remarkably well for a show like this. I thought the production as a whole was quite competent, though some of my compatriots felt the costuming was not sufficiently accurate to the period. But that aside, I thought the interpretation of Albee's work was very solid, and on the whole well worth seeing.

OTP has been a very reliable source of quality theater in the east bay of late, particularly when Moran directs. I really look forward to their work, though I'm generally not enamored of the theater space.