Theater Review - Lambs to the slaughter
What sharp teeth the Alliance’s Woolf has
“You’re balding,” Martha tells George.
“So are you,” George fires back to Martha.
“I swear, if you existed, I’d divorce you,” Martha sneers to George.
And that’s George and Martha being nice to each other. When Edward Albee’s notorious bickering couple from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? play for keeps, they turn marital bickering into a thermonuclear blood sport, achieving mutually assured destruction that wreaks collateral damage on hapless bystanders.
Though more than 40 years old, Woolf’s portrait of a vicious marriage can still cut a jaded audience to the quick. The Alliance’s production doesn’t tiptoe reverently around the material but seizes it by the throat and rises to the challenge of a long, demanding play.
Late one night after a faculty party, Martha (Margo Skinner), the middle-aged daughter of the university president, informs her husband George (Tracy Letts) that she’s invited hot young professor Nick (Joe Knezevich) and his rather dippy wife Honey (Courtney Patterson) over for a nightcap. The younger couple probably imagines a harmless social call but they’d actually be safer at Castle Frankenstein.
George and Martha freely needle each other in Nick and Honey’s presence, and their verbal sparring only gets worse. But aside from Woolf’s title bout, most of the first two acts pit the men against each other — it’s like George wants to warm up with someone easy before taking on his wife. George’s career as a history professor has fizzled while Nick’s expertise with genetic engineering makes him the wave of the future. Through cat-and-mouse small talk, the older man attacks with all the resentments of age against youth, and the past’s fury at being brushed aside by time.
Director Amy Morton and actor Tracy Letts are both from Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and they live up to the troupe’s reputation for vivid, edgy drama. Morton, Letts and Skinner keep George and Martha from becoming caricatures of a loudmouth wife and henpecked husband. Letts makes George a lion in winter. Though the actor has the mellifluous voice of a regular on a Sunday morning political talk show, when Martha corners him, he drops into a more guttural, emotional register, making him both more frightened and more frightening.
Whether being a vulgar floozy or a sexual tigress, Skinner has the throaty voice and magnetism of a character actress like Brenda Vaccaro. She stays conscious of Martha’s vulnerability, and even when she lashes out, we’re aware of the pains and frustrations in her pale, almost ghostly eyes.
Knezevich looks exactly the part of an early 1960s “golden boy” — he could have stepped from a Playboy cigarette ad. As Honey, who’s either dim or drunk through most of the play, Patterson excels at an easily mishandled role. In the first act, Honey has a grand old time, only perceiving the spoken pleasantries and not the obvious sarcasm. Even when she’s just a spectator, she has telling reactions, like a child watching her parents fight.
Morton still has to contend with Woolf’s length. The three-hour show clocks essentially in real time (even the intermissions), and almost claustrophobically keeps to the front portion of Loy Arcenas’ deceptively homey set. The production could breathe a little more easily if the actors had more room to move. At least Michelle M. Habeck’s shadowy lighting design emphasizes the show’s pessimistic gloom, and when characters go up the ill-lit stairs, they seem to ascend into darkness.
Fortunately the cast’s energy doesn’t flag over the long haul, and they make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the best non-musical play on the Alliance’s main stage in the last two years. Albee pointedly named his antiheroic duo after George and Martha Washington, the First Couple of the United States. Scorching productions like this one affirm George and Martha’s position as the first couple of modern American theater as well.