Woolf bite

Edward Albee shows his teeth at Trinity Rep

by Carolyn Clay

WHO'S AFRAID OF
VIRGINIA WOOLF? By Edward Albee. Directed by Amanda Dehnert. Set design by David Jenkins. Lighting by Amy Appleyard. Costumes by William Lane. With Brian McEleney, Anne Scurria, Stephen Thorne, and Tanya Anderson. At Trinity Repertory Company, through November 12.

"I cry all the time. And Georgie cries all the time, too . . . and then, what we do," says an extremely drunken Martha at the beginning of round three of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, "we take our tears, and we put 'em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays until they're all frozen and then . . . we put them . . . in our . . . drinks." Indeed, more tears and booze flow through Edward Albee's searing if overlong 1962 masterwork than through any American drama since Eugene O'Neill stopped manning the spigots. And at Trinity Repertory Company, where the play is being expertly if exhaustingly revived, the ice-cube recipe, which also calls for tankards of venom and vitriol, is just about right.

I cannot recall ever seeing Trinity's smaller, downstairs theater configured as an arena. But it is here, with the all-American marital combatants named for the Washingtons circling each other like the main attractions at a bear baiting. Amanda Dehnert's staging strips away the New England-homy clutter of most productions, furnishing the trapezoidal arena with three chairs and the all-important tea-cart bar. The arrangement is backed by the wood-frame skeleton of a two-story house that -- unlike the characters -- is not yet plastered. Clearly we are meant not only to witness Albee's lacerating "Walpurgisnacht" and "Exorcism" (as acts two and three are titled) but also to stare through George and Martha's centuries-running battle at our fellow audience members. And however involved we may be in the umpteenth outing of the play, it's hard not to see our neighbors' wickedly laughing faces congeal, as the bumptious battle turns nasty, into dismay and compassion. We are, almost as much as visitors/pawns Nick and Honey, complicit in this corrosive, intimate ritual, out of which hope may spring.

Ounce per ounce, there is more bitchiness in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than in Eau de Bette Davis mixed with Martin McDonagh paint thinner. It is hard to imagine anyone more deftly acerb than the young Edward Albee. But the play, written when the author was in his early 30s, is not without pretension and, toward the end, some sogginess. That the late-night party at which dead-ended history professor George and his braying college-president's-daughter wife Martha entertain opportunistic new biologist Nick and his delicate cipher-wife Honey is also meant to trace the decline of Western Civilization is not among Albee's finer points. But it is surprising how well the play, through sheer force of heart and wit, stands up. Certainly its prescient screeds against genetic engineering have not gone the way of the dodo.

Yet Virginia Woolf is neither pure allegory nor a period piece. And Dehnert's fight-night staging, its early-'60s details floating in a timeless, stripped-down space, fits Albee's arch, heightened realism. I particularly admire the way in which the production's convincingly unstable drunks steady themselves against the low railing that surrounds the playing space as if it were part of a conventional living room. Neither do Trinity veterans Brian McEleney and Anne Scurria fumble the play's beautifully crafted, almost baroque litany of barbs, accusations, and bloodletting. In their mouths, Albee's lexicon of impossibly polished putdowns gleams and does not flicker.

Both the play and the production (the latter clocking in at three and one-quarter hours, including two intermissions) are longer than they need to be. On the other hand, as with Long Day's Journey into Night, a certain amount of exhaustion is built into the healing at which Albee, characterizing his marathon marital battle a "love story," hints. George, Martha, Honey, and Nick, he implies, may rise from the early-morning ashes of this unusually articulate bender purged of all comforting illusion and the better for it. That George and Martha's longest-running "game" and most binding illusion, the co-created story of their fantasy son, is a bit on the treacly side doesn't mute the pain of its exorcism -- though it does create a long row of keening for the heretofore toweringly abrasive Martha to hoe.

McEleney and Scurria have been collaborating, as George might put it, since "the Punic Wars." And they make that work for George and Martha. I would rather the earthy Scurria had played against rather than into the vulgarian in Martha and that McEleney had brought more weariness to his piercing George. But Scurria understands that Martha's martyr arias are set pieces, and the two long-time acting partners bring out the perverse Noël Coward comedy, as well as the blood and guts and twisted love, in George and Martha's wedlock gridlock. They also alter the play's dynamic. Although McEleney's George is of a lighter timbre and Scurria's Martha spends most of the first two acts pounding him with her heavier mien, the metal-voiced actor's chilling intensity makes George never seem the weaker half. As Nick, newcomer Stephen Thorne brings an almost touchingly boyish force to Nick. And Tanya Anderson is a sad-funny Honey, enthusiastically if foggily going with the flow.

Nick says of the back-and-forth flagellation at which George and Martha are such pros: "Sometimes I can admire things I don't admire." Thirty-eight years after it first poured linguistic turpentine over a Broadway stage, the not wholly admirable Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still lights up a theater.