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Review: ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ @ 7 Stages
THEATER REVIEW “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee. Grade: B-. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. and 5 p.m. Sundays. 7 Stages Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave. 404-523-7647, www.7stages.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The scariest Halloween gala this season will likely be the all-night drinking party thrown by George and Martha, those washed-out university types from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” running through Nov. 2 at 7 Stages Theatre.
In this classic of marital dysfunction — the play energized American theater in its day, although it famously lost the 1963 Pulitzer Prize — the repellent hosts make much of the hazy gap between “truth or illusion.”
But Del Hamilton’s direction — a co-production with the University of Georgia’s Film and Theater Department — makes clear that nobody here is dealing with any objective truths. As if drawn from true life, the cast is made up of UGA faculty (as the hosts) and students (as their tortured young guests) and the production has already played in Athens. That on-stage seasoning shows in the actors’ supple timing and their modulation into near-depravity as the drama approaches its scorched-earth finish.
George and Martha have names that remind us of the parents of our country, and Nick and Honey are the no-name youths, but they are hardly examples of the American every man and every woman — or even of humanity stripped bare of artifice.
Not in Hamilton’s vision. Here, the hosts flirt and cuddle a bit at the start but represent little more than the worst flaws in the American character. Like a particularly nasty presidential election campaign, the sparring sides manipulate, concoct elaborate buttons to push, sling arrows to pierce the skin and joylessly engage in reciprocal humiliations — all the while knowing that they’ll have to keep doing business the next day.
And the quartet of partiers never step away from the other’s attack, either, making psychological sadomasochism a central conceit, here without any kinkiness.
Indeed, Hamilton and crew introduce the clash of illicit sex, politics and hovering death as a sort of pre-drama prelude, with Martha (Kristin Kundert-Gibbs) reenacting Marilyn Monroe’s breathy “Happy Birthday” come-on song to President Kennedy from 1962 — the starlet’s last public appearance before her suicide, as a program note reminds us.
Yet Kundert-Gibbs’ delivery of a shrieking, “castrating female” makes the character one-dimensional. She makes herself almost devoid of sex-appeal or sympathy, which emphasizes that the men pay her heed for one reason: the approval of her father, the powerful university president.
Ray Paolino is a disciplined, focused actor, relaxed in his own skin and entirely plausible as George, the nebbish, passive-aggressive intellectual who suffers his wife’s disfigured hang-ups. His barely-suppressed rage, finally let loose as an open hydrant of bile, is what fires much of this production.
While the older generation are easy to read, I have mixed reactions to the bland young couple — a rookie professor and his callow wife — and these impressions change scene by scene.
Ruth Crews, a pipsqueaky Reese Witherspoon blonde, is Honey. Superficially, she’s exactly right: sort-of cute, defenseless and almost as dim as she lets on. Yet there’s more room for subtle realization in her character than Crews can muster.
As her street-smart hubby, initially bashful, Jonathan Phipps’s Nick is a chisel-jawed Aryan blond — he jokingly gives a Nazi salute once, in case you hadn’t made the connection — but he, too, doesn’t quite inhabit the role.
Perhaps not his fault, he can’t convince us that his dangerous attraction to Martha, given her train-wreck demeanor, is legit. Like much of this production of “Virginia Woolf,” it’s a near-miss at a tale that rings of pure horror.
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Comments
By Blanca
October 24, 2008 1:17 PM | Link to this
Is this the play with the pony in it?
By jpmist
November 3, 2008 12:18 PM | Link to this
My take is that the staging was excellent, the casting less so. Kundert-Gibbs was all bray and no heart with far less personality than her husband, Paolino who should have had none. Crews and Phipps I though were dead on and Crews was mesmerizing in her focus on that glass of brandy.
I disliked the ending which was staged as a sort of abstract tableau; the actors speaking out to the audience, no longer connecting to each other. That didn’t work for me.
This play is like the superbowl of acting, just pulling it off deserves high praise. This production deserves more than that.