Theatre Exile's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?': 'Splendid, funny and wrenching

'Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, eh, toots?"

That question is central to this juicy and monumental play, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And, it turns out, we're all of us "toots."

Theatre Exile's production, under Joe Canuso's smart direction, of this iconic American drama is both splendid and funny and wrenching, just as it should be. A highly skilled and subtle quartet of actors makes this happen.

It's 2 a.m. A middle-age couple, George (the extraordinary Pearce Bunting), a history professor, and his wife, Martha (Catharine Slusar, with a wild, wide range of passion), the university president's daughter, have just come home from a faculty party. Ding-dong, guests arrive: Nick (Jake Blouch, in a slick and sexy rendering of a slick and sexy character), a young biology professor, and his meek, "slim-hipped" wife, Honey (Emilie Krause), arrive to spend the rest of the night drinking, fighting, and nasty game-playing. The passionate old folks can run rings around the ambitious and soulless youngsters.

Act I is laugh-out-loud funny; Act II starts well but then seems to slacken (partly because of Albee's revision of the script) into bourgeois melodrama. Act III is both deeply appalling and deeply moving.

Not a minute of the three-plus hours is ever less than compelling theater, with each performance honed to a sharp edge: Krause's mousy drunkenness, Bunting's killing smile, Blouch's steely-blue eyes widening, Slusar's braying laugh.

There are perfect details in the set, a messy, book-filled "dump" of a house (designed by Meghan Jones), and in the costuming (designed by Katherine Fritz). For a tiny example, Martha's vulgar, too-tight black dress in Act I reappears in Act III without her push-up bra.

With names like George and Martha - their implied last name is, of course, Washington - the play is not just about dysfunctional families and embattled marriages. It's about the "truth and illusion" of the American Dream. As George points out (it's not for nothing that Albee has made him a history professor), civilization itself is at stake. When he reads aloud a passage from Spengler's The Decline of the West, "and the West, encumbered by crippling alliances . . . must eventually fall," we see that it's not just the relationships and careers that are the "crippling alliances."

Albee's play, written more than 50 years ago, is still a cautionary tale. No wonder they're all afraid of Virginia Woolf, the high priestess of the inner life.

Through May 17 at Plays and Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place. Tickets $10-40. Information: 215-218-4022 or www.theatreexile.org.EndText