Review: WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

By Toby Zinman

For the Inquirer

"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-aged 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 about 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+ 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), with, for a tiny example, Martha's vulgar too-tight black dress in Act I reappearing 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, but 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 Decline of the West, "and the West, encumbered by crippling alliances...must eventually fall," we see that is not just the relationships and the careers that are the "crippling alliances." Albee's play, written more than fifty years ago, is still a cautionary tale. No wonder they're all afraid of Virginia Woolf, the high priestess of the inner life.

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