Battle royal Albee’s Woolf still has its teeth BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Edward Albee. Directed by Anthony Page. Set by John Lee Beatty. Costumes by Jane Greenwood. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Sound by Mark Bennett. With Kathleen Turner, Bill Irwin, Mireille Enos, and David Harbour. At the Wilbur Theatre through March 6.

"Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf?" goes the jauntily sung eggheads’ joke that supplies the querying title of Edward Albee’s famed 1962 rumble in the marital jungle. And the answer to the question would seem to be Broadway. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whose 1966 film incarnation starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, has not brought its marathon display of drunken, Darwinian bad behavior in academe to the Great White Way since 1976, when the playwright directed a revival. Now Boston gets the first look at a crackling if insufficiently purgative production that’s set to open next month at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre. The surprise is that the gifted New Vaudevillian Bill Irwin puts a postmodern, post-Burton spin on George that’s less sonorous and sorrowful than sly and incisive, whereas Kathleen Turner, who’s seemingly born and built for the vulgar vulnerability that won Taylor an Oscar, brings the called-for braying, spilling-out, almost masculine sexuality to Martha but has not yet surrendered herself, bereft, to the possibly redemptive guillotine that falls with the third-act curtain.

At the helm of the new yet wisely true-to-period staging is Britisher Anthony Page, who has directed several Albee plays in London. His contributions include ratcheting up the play’s bruising black humor and sharpening the edges of those Get-the-Guests pawns, visiting younger couple Nick and Honey. David Harbour imbues the smug, opportunistic biologist with a cordial yet muscular arrogance that harbors actual menace; in the end, George may eat him like a Wheatie, but the prickly blond morsel will hurt going down. And Mireille Enos, snorting her twangy phonemes and slinging herself around like a rag doll in Barbie clothing, brings a nervous but enthused hysteria to the slim-hipped faculty wifelet who grows more disheveled along with the evening. Page should probably rein her in a little, but this buttercup-clad and begirdled Honey is no cipher.

For those of you who have spent the past 43 years under a rock: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? charts a late-night post-faculty-party gathering chez George and Martha, a deadly duet tucked into a quartet that follows a more orchestral schmooze hosted by Martha’s college-president dad. Returning home, disappointed as usual with George, a "bog" in the History Department, Martha announces she’s invited Biology instructor Nick and his mousy wife, the pair newly arrived from the Midwest, for more booze and banter. Whether she’s after flirtation or just an audience is hard to tell, as she and George launch into their customary corrosive fisticuffs, then pull the younger couple into the ring for some exercise before George delivers the Million Dollar Baby blow to his and Martha’s one tenderly shared illusion. Of course, unlike Hilary Swank’s character in the Oscar-nominated film, George and Martha never knock each other out in the first round, and the exhaustion that figures into their three-hours-plus "walking what’s left of our wits" is, as with Long Day’s Journey into Night, essential to the experience of the play. (That said, it’s hard to argue that much was sacrificed in Mike Nichols’s slimmed-down 131-minute film.)

Many heads have been scratched over the allegorical aspect of Albee’s best-known work, with its ferocious co-dependent couple named for the Mom and Pop of the nation and its now-almost-quaint dust-up between the History revered by George and the Historic Inevitability presented by potential genetic engineer Nick. But what makes Virginia Woolf? monumental, if no longer shocking, is its sometimes incantatory barrage of bon mot that could remove paint and the touching if savage love story of George and Martha: "sad, sad, sad." O’Neill’s characters survive by their pipe dreams; Albee suggests that there comes a time when illusion must be killed off and the night gotten through without it. And who will get George and Martha through the rest of a battered if possibly unbowed life but each other?

By his own report, Albee had cast about for the right George and Martha for several years before marrying the barking, bawdy Turner to the faded yet boyish Irwin. Her reading is right if conventional: full of daddy worship and badgering emasculation, with a dare-you come-hither. Defying movie-star vanity, she bellies right up to Martha’s loud, frustrated persona and parades like a tigress in her unflattering zebra-meets-leopard ’60s loungewear. But she reacts more viscerally to George’s hair pulling and taunting slaps — surface blows — than to the psychic surgery he performs on her soul. For his part, the deceptively nondescript Irwin, slightly simian arms held apart from a slumping but taut torso, then starting to jab with brute economy, is the embodiment of Nick’s remark that "it’s you sneaky types worry me the most, you know. You ineffectual sons of bitches . . . you’re the worst." Or, when it comes to Albee’s cagily destructive games, the best.