“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” conjures images of the 1966 film where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were behaving rather than acting as they swilled alcohol and disemboweled each other with Edward Albee’s rapier prose. However, put aside Dick and Liz and embrace instead Andrew Weems and Deborah Hedwall as George and Martha as director Ethan McSweeney brings Albee’s tale of New England’s most dysfunctional couple to Center Stage.
Scenic director Lee Savage has cleverly substituted large glass windows on wires for a curtain, raising and lowering them to signal the start and end of each act. There are windows, but no walls, and the effect, as the play is performed in-the-round in the intimate Head Theater, is to grant the audience X-ray vision. We see everything — George’s bookcase and desk, the half-filled glasses, the door chimes, and a three-hour operation.
A double autopsy, to be more exact. George and Martha conduct a mutual evisceration, slicing through epidermis, muscle, bone, “right down to the marrow,” as George explains, only words are their scalpel and the patients are still alive.
Watching like stunned first-year medical students are George and Martha’s late night guests, Nick (Erik Heger) and Honey (Leah Curney) who can’t help but be spattered, then soaked in their hosts’ verbal carnage — all “blood under the bridge” as George quips — until they try their hand at the knife themselves.
The play does strain one’s credulity, however. Nick and Honey enter the room looking like 1950s America personified. All too quickly, Honey is passed out from brandy and Nick is playing “hump the hostess.” But that is one of the many points of this comic, clever, and carnal play: There is darkness beneath our bright exteriors, and what may seem like a contradiction in fact makes perfect sense.
IF YOU GO
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is at Center Stage, 700 North Calvert St., now through Nov. 30, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Thursday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with a 2 p.m. weekend matinee. Tickets are $10-$60. Call 410-332-0033 or go online at www.centerstage.org
