At Shotgun, ‘Virginia Woolf ’ is still scary

At first, Nina Ball’s set design for the Shotgun Players’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” is distracting. An LED-lit bar stocked with bottles and tinctures of every shade — royal purple and amber, aqua and sickly green — sits behind a wooden floor with a midcentury parquet pattern, and that floor is completely empty.

Edward Albee’s drama — which was recommended for the Pulitzer Prize in 1963 but deemed too indecent to win it — is often housed in a cluttered, crusty library of a sitting room to match the middle-aged couple who reside in it: George, a deadweight associate professor, and his wife, Martha, daughter of the college president.

What’s initially distracting about the set isn’t just the departure from design tradi-

Pak Han / Shotgun Players Beth Wilmurt (left) as Martha and David Sinaiko as George in Shotgun Players’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?”