Friday, March 12, 2004
Cast brings out
ugliness of ‘Woolf’
Review by John Berger
The dialogue of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' doesn't have the same shock value it did 40 years ago,
but the ugliness of the story and the cruelty of the characters are fully intact in the Army Community Readers
Theatre production of Edward Albee's living-room horror fest.
Richard Pellett and Jo Pruden star as George and Martha. Shari Lynn and Russell Motter complete the cast as
Honey and Nick.
Director Vanita Rae Smith and her all-star cast explore every hideous nook and cranny of the tale. There are a
few funny moments amid all the caustic quips and insults, but 'Woolf' is a brutal dissection of a toxic yet
oddly symbiotic marriage. Contemporary sitcom 'insult comedy' does not compare.
The brutal battle of wits takes place in George and Martha's home. He is a history professor at a small New
England college. She is his wife and just happens to be the daughter of the near-godlike school president.
George seemed to be on the fast track to success when he married Martha, who is six years his senior and
apparently had few other prospects when they met. Now, at 46, it seems certain George will never be promoted
to full professor, let alone become the department chairman. Martha contemptuously describes him as a
'bog' and rarely misses an opportunity to belittle him.
She has plenty of opportunities when a younger couple unwittingly accepts an invitation to stop by at 2 a.m.
after a faculty cocktail party.
Nick, the newest member of the biology department, is handsome, athletic and ambitious. Martha wastes no
time pointing out that Nick is everything George never was. George takes an almost instant dislike to Nick
and then tries to shake him up while probing for weaknesses.
Nick's wife, Honey, is fragile, somewhat dim-witted, and spends a good part of the next few hours throwing
up in the bathroom or sleeping on the bathroom floor.
Nick and Honey become pawns to be used and abused as George and Martha raise the stakes in their verbal
lugfest. They have rules they follow when abusing each other, but the younger couple isn't attuned to them
and is left to blunder along blindly. The psychological "games" get nastier as the night goes on, with Nick
and Honey gradually becoming participants. Martha flirts aggressively with Nick, and George bores in
relentlessly on the problems he detects in the younger couple's relationship.
It also becomes more difficult to determine how much of what George and Martha are revealing about each
other is true.