Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Steppenwolf Theatre Company
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The play focuses on a middle-aged couple—bookish, seemingly ineffectual George, an associate history professor at a small New England college, and his lusty, binge-drinking, ball-breaking wife, Martha, daughter of the school’s president. After a punishing 23 years of marriage they’ve developed a bleak routine in which light jests turn into cutting jabs and trivial disagreements escalate into major battles. Late one Saturday night, after a faculty party, Martha invites a younger couple—handsome young biology professor Nick and mousy Honey—back to the house, where she and George use them as pawns in a relentless and profane game of one-upmanship. In the course of the liquor-fueled verbal brawl, Martha lets slip that she and George have a son who, she says, is returning the next day to celebrate his 21st birthday. George is enraged—not only by mention of the son, who (spoiler alert) has always been their private fiction, but also by Martha’s flirtations with Nick. A geneticist, Nick poses both a professional and sexual threat to George: he represents the wave of the future while George is stuck in a discipline that an innovation-loving society would just as soon ignore.
Finally roused from emotional hibernation, George shreds the lies and illusions that have sustained the marriage, particularly the ones involving the couple’s “son.”
Tracy Letts’s pipe-chomping, brooding, introspective George is a welcome change from the quirkily mannered one Bill Irwin created for a Broadway production that toured to Chicago in 2007. Letts’s George is a man who’s made emotional and intellectual compromises to sustain a soured marriage and is now discovering that those compromises are no longer sufficient. With her crackling, sexy stage presence and ironic wit, Amy Morton is a keenly self-aware Martha who, despite her incessant jokes at her husband’s expense, holds out hope that intimacy and a sense of partnership might someday return to their relationship. Though dark-haired rather than blond as the script specifies, Madison Dirks embodies Albee’s vision of Nick as a modern American übermensch. And Carrie Coon is moving as Honey, a character all too easily played for misogynistic laughs as a ditzy twit.
