‘Virginia Woolf ’ retains power to scare
tion but how it allows director Mark Jackson and his four-person ensemble to break conventions of stage composition and physical interaction. It’s odd to see two impeccably dressed couples struggle to situate themselves on an inexplicably bare floor as they exchange pleasantries, or to watch tensions flare between two grown men as one stands and the other sits at his feet.
But “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” isn’t a comfortable play, and as you try to settle in to its three hours of excruciating mind games, manipulative wordplay and, more than 50 years later and a month after the playwright’s death, still incisive attack on bourgeois norms, the physical arrangement of the actors starts to look more normal and in fact cannily suited to the play.
In Ball and Jackson’s vision, the characters are not in a living room but a barren landscape, like that of a Dalí painting, so isolated from the rest of the world that maybe there isn’t a world outside to escape to at all.
That helps explain why Nick (Josh Schell), a newcomer to the college faculty, and his wife, Honey (Megan Trout), stick around once George (David Sinaiko) and Martha (Beth Wilmurt) start picking apart the conceit of the younger couple’s marriage.
The set also helps explain why George and Martha stay in their own toxic marriage. One of American theater’s most fascinating couples, George and Martha are riven by years of resentments, barbs and carping.
But even on the night when the play is set — a night that might mark the final blow to their marriage, a night which begins at 2 in the morning, when Martha invites Honey and Nick over for drinks after a faculty party — the pair still take deep joy in each other’s quick wits, the special idiom they’ve built over the years, an idiom only they can speak, one with which they elevate themselves and pull the rug out from under everyone else.
In Wilmurt’s and Sinaiko’s renderings, however, George and Martha don’t create the erotic tension that’s supposed to help fuel their nightlong — their lifelong — war. Though both actors have moments of astonishing clarity, Sinaiko makes George avuncular, and Wilmurt almost seems miscast as Martha. A longtime Shotgun artist, she is always a performer of acute intelligence and focus, but the sloppiness in Martha’s character that makes her speak and behave like a wild animal don’t feel at home in this actor.
Trout and Schell fare better as the younger couple. Trout’s exaggerated, automaton-like delivery heightens the surrealism suggested by the set, and Schell shows Nick as trapped behind a mask. Especially at the show’s beginning, much of his lines have a restrained, sinister quality, which deftly hints at the devastation that’s to come.
Still, if Jackson’s “Virginia Woolf ” isn’t flawless, it still frightening, as the show’s title suggests. American theater might have lost its greatest living playwright last month, but Shotgun shows that Albee’s ideas are very much alive — potently, unnervingly so.
The set helps explain why George and Martha stay in their own toxic marriage. One of theater’s most fascinating couples, George and Martha are riven by resentments, barbs and carping.