Domestic blisters

George and Martha go for the throat in Trinity Rep's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Bill Rodriguez

Brian McEleney and Anne Scurria

In 1962, a play hit Broadway like a thunderclap, and even non-theatergoers around the country turned to it in fascinated alarm. American values and assumptions about the rightness of rank, ambition, and even marital harmony were called into question when Off-Broadway wonder Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? single-handedly brought social criticism back into American theater. No playwright from Neil Simon to Nicky Silver could ever again write a couple arguing without hearing the barrages that George and Martha, in all their twisted intelligence, lobbed with surgical precision.

Trinity Repertory Company is currently staging this Tony Award-winning, Pulitzer-nominated black dramedy. (The drama award committee's reaction time was such, that four years later they anointed his far less worthy A Delicate Balance.) The play takes place over the course of one night and is set in an anonymous college town. We are in the home of middle-aged faculty couple George, an unambitious associate professor of history, and his alcoholic wife Martha, the daughter of the college president. Their guests are a young couple who have recently moved to the town. Nick teaches biology and talks about experimenting to improve humanity. His wife, whom we know only as Honey, is a mousy sort who doesn't say much. The hosts' quarreling, which is deftly aimed at each other's vulnerabilities, progresses over the increasingly lubricated evening. Early on, the game "Get the Guests" pulls the young couple into their hosts' cruel practice of stripping away façades and self-delusions. This night George and Martha go farther than usual, and dawn reveals the rubble of psychological devastation that may or may not result in change.

Set designer David Jenkins has put together a small, claustrophobic space in the downstairs theater, separating the actors from us by pipe railings, as though they are in some sort of arena.

Directed by Amanda Dehnert, Nick and Honey are played by new company member Stephen Thorne and Trinity Conservatory student Tanya Anderson. George and Martha are company veterans Brian McEleney and Anne Scurria. (Virginia Woolf was last seen at Trinity, with Richard Kneeland and Lois Markle in the leads, in 1979, the year that Scurria began performing here.) Sitting in the Trinity archives room before rehearsal, a week before previews, they spoke about this classic of American theater and their experiences trying to inhabit these larger-than-life American archetypes.

Q: Have any other roles prepared you for the grueling psychological space of these characters?

Anne: In some ways it's like Lady Macbeth, in the sense of dealing with such huge events. It's kind of an encapsulation of all the problems in a marriage in one evening.

There are times I sit there and I think, "Why do I do this?" My family was very different from Brian's and my father had a rage disorder and we had a lot of violent fighting . . . I've done a lot of therapy and I've done a lot of things to get beyond this -- "Why am I doing this?" I haven't come up with an answer yet.

Brian: It's not an ordinary arc. It's not that George goes from being a mousy, spineless jellyfish and discovers his -- lots of plays do that . . . These are people who have been doing this for decades, and it's settled into a pattern, and all of a sudden in this play the pattern breaks; it goes into an entirely new level this evening and brings you to another place where they're going at it, as we say in the play, "to the death."

Q: This play must take a lot of stamina, keeping you laser-eyed for two hours plus.

Brian: It is, but it's supposed to be difficult. It's one of the great plays and two of the great roles.

Anne: It's huge. It's oceanic. It's trying to create an ocean of play to take the audience on the journey you want. Usually you create a river of play or a lake of play . . . The play is incredible. It really takes on a momentum and an energy of its own. So that we find ourselves not being able to remember what's in what act, almost. It begins and you go. Things come up and you deal with them and there's no time for thinking ahead and saying, "Oh, I have to get ready for this now." You just have to be ready -- (Brian laughs) or else.

Q: Everybody has seen the film version, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. With a play you don't get close-ups, though. You can't understate the big emotions with just your eyebrows.

Brian: The great thing about being on stage is that we get to do it. It's not the director making those decisions [in camera movement and editing]. You can be really large and then you can take the audience to another level just by changing your level of intensity . . . There is a danger of blowing the thing out of the water. We have to be really, really careful all the time of not showboating or grandstanding. But as long as it's really, really focused on each other it will always be the right size.

Anne: The thing is, when you're doing a movie and somebody is having a close-up, you're off. You don't have to be reacting. One of the hardest things about the play is that we both go on very long things and the other person has to be listening. And what you're doing and how you're hearing what the other person is saying is very important in how you get to the place where you have to go.

There are these moments when really anything can happen. Those moments of spectacular possibility have to be present for us and for the audience, and they are breathtaking. Even in rehearsal, it's like the air in the room gets sucked out.

Q: At the end of the play it's dawn and there's a lull. Is this the calm before just another storm for George and Martha, as you understand your characters, or do you think they've prepared to change?

Brian: I think we all feel -- all of us who have worked on this production -- that it is a hopeful moment. And that's all it is. It's a new dawn. The dawn of a day that could be horrible . . . but it's going to be different.

Anne: We feel that because we found that these are two people who love each other very much, that they're not two people who hate each other. It's the depth of their love for each other that makes them so vicious, rather than the depth of their hatred.

Brian: It is like therapy, what they go through. Everybody who's married, everybody who has any kind of a relationship knows that you get into patterns. Sometimes the things you do start out perfectly benignly and then they take on a life of their own, and you can't escape from them and they become wrong.

One of the great things about the play is that it's utterly unsentimental. There's not a sentimental moment in it. So you don't get to the end and say, Oh now they're going to be happy. Most bad marriages we know manifest themselves in people not dealing with each other. And this marriage is not that. This is people trying to engage, all the time.

Anne: It's a birth, in many ways. It's a three-hour labor. You get the birth at the end of something. You don't know what it's going to be, but it's new.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will be at Trinity Rep September 22 through November 12. Call 351-4242.