Monday, September 28, 2009

Compass’s Virginia Woolf: Good Production of Classic Black Comedy

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Nobody ever went to see Edward Albee’s dark, corrosive comedy-drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? expecting to be uplifted or to come away with a new respect for the beauty of the human spirit. It was an overnight success when it premiered on Broadway in 1962 — when it takes place — but the reputation of the play was sealed when Richard Watts, Jr. of the New York Post called it “the most shattering drama I have seen since O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Revisiting an acknowledged masterpiece that shocked audiences two generations ago is a risky move for Compass Theatre — sometimes such a revival merely leaves audience members shaking their heads and wondering, “They found that ‘shattering’ in 1962?” Fortunately for Compass, though, Virginia Woolf still packs a punch — and their production delivers it expertly.

For those who’ve never seen it, either on stage or film, and don’t know what it’s about — including the young woman at the September 26 preview who, when her dad told her it had been a movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, asked, “Who are they?” — Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? takes place in the early morning of September 10, 1962 in a small cottage on the grounds of an unnamed college in New Carthage, a village in an equally unnamed New England state. Martha (Glynn Bedington), the daughter of the college’s president, and her husband, history professor George (Compass Theatre founder and executive director Dale Morris), have just returned home from a big party called by the president to welcome everybody to the new school year. Though it’s already past midnight and everyone involved has already tanked up on alcoholic potables, Martha has invited a newly hired biology professor, Nick (Tyler Joshua Herdklotz), and Nick’s wife Honey (Kelly Iverson), for a sort-of after-party.

As the four do even more heavy-duty drinking, they launch into a series of abusive psychological games summed up in the titles Albee gave to each of the play’s three acts: “Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht” and “The Exorcism.” Most of the interactions between the characters revolve around sex, but much of the play also deals with the lies with which people surround themselves and the ways they use alcohol, sex and psychological abuse to keep from facing up to the truths about themselves. Part of the play’s enduring power comes from its weaknesses — particularly Albee’s scathing hatred of women. While other 20th Century Gay playwrights created compelling female characters — Noël Coward by having his straight women behave like Gay men and Tennessee Williams by idealizing them as fragile icons — Albee made his women either monstrous bitches like Martha or useless flotsam like Honey.

At the same time, Albee was too good a playwright to make Martha only a bitch. The key to making Virginia Woolf work is not only to capture the basic situation — Martha’s (and her father’s) social position, her open infidelities and her sharp, booze-honed tongue have totally emasculated George, who’s a barely competent wimp as both human and professor — but to communicate the pathos behind it. Done right, as it is here, Virginia Woolf’s rare periods of repose — the passing interludes in which the characters let down their defenses and talk instead of screaming — are its most memorable parts.

Albee’s agenda encompasses a good deal more than a portrait of a psychologically abusive marriage. He balances his plot so that both women have issues around pregnancy and reproduction; the “hysterical pregnancy” with which Honey tricked Nick into marrying her in the first place has a grim echo in the truth behind George and Martha’s unseen son. And he adds an odd fillip in a fantasy George lurches into when he finds out Nick is a biologist and not a math professor (as Martha told him earlier — though she’s right, in a way, since any scientist must have a good understanding of high-level math), George instantly leaps to the conclusion that “you people are rearranging my genes, so that everyone will be like everyone else” — and so pregnancy, a problem for both women in the piece, will no longer be necessary. This speech “reads” quite a bit differently now, in the age of in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, stem-cell research, the Human Genome Project and the promise of “designer babies,” than it no doubt did in 1962. Indeed, it seems so prescient I wondered if Albee had added it in a later revision of his play — but no, it’s in the original script.

Anyone coming to Virginia Woolf “live” after only having seen it in the film version — especially if, like me, you’ve only seen the film on TV, cable or home video — will be startled at how it comes over with an audience. What’s especially surprising is how funny it is; though the laugh lines have the sting of a scorpion’s tail, they’re there and they provoke a kind of I-can’t-believe-I’m-finding-this-amusing-but-I-am reaction and an accompanying nervous laughter. Also, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton played Martha and George with a kind of stylized, almost operatic intensity that Bedington and Morris don’t try to match — which, paradoxically, makes the characters far more believable as real people in Compass’s production.

Flaunting her sexuality in a skin-tight pantsuit she dons midway through the first act and keeps on for the rest, Bedington’s Martha is a riveting mixture of personal and sexual frustration that expresses itself in alcoholism and bitchery. Under the effective direction of Shana Wride, Bedington knows just how far to stick her claws out in each scene. Morris gives us a befuddled reading of George — he’s in over his head and, unlike Richard Burton’s version of George, he’s all too aware of it — that makes us feel sorry for him even when he’s provoked enough to take on Martha and beat her, or at least fight her to a draw, at her own game.

The two other actors are more problematic — though that’s at least partly Albee’s fault for underwriting the characters. Had he given Nick and Honey more steel, more weapons to fight back when George and Martha draw them in to their brutal games, Virginia Woolf would be an even better play than it is. Instead, they’re simply catalysts for the ultimate “exorcism” between George and Martha — and that makes them a challenge for the actors playing them. Though Herdklotz is listed in the program as a building contractor who “has been performing in the San Diego area for years,” he’s awfully young-looking on stage — more like 18 than the character’s stated age of 28 — and therefore he comes across as even more callow and naïve than Albee probably intended. Iverson is a striking actress with a strong resemblance to the young Audrey Hepburn, but she’s not well showcased in a role that basically requires her to get sick, throw up and have a nervous breakdown. (Another playwright might have made us admire the one character who can’t hold their liquor; not Albee.)

Director Wride keeps up the play’s energy level, has the characters in almost constant motion — thereby making them seem like lab rats trapped in the one room in which it all takes place — and evokes first-rate performances from her leads. Set designer and constructor Adam Lindsay frames the action in a simple but realistic space (Bruce Baer and Kevin Berry helped him build it). Lisa Burgess is credited with costume design but seems to have had a hand in the props as well — including an awesome console record player of the period she found by accident in a storage facility where it was about to be thrown away. (The sound of the records being played seems actually to come from this machine, scratches, distortion and all, rather than the theatre’s overall P.A. from which period jazz, particularly Miles Davis and John Coltrane, emerges between the acts.)

Besides the usual credits, the program features a separate list of “contributors” including choreographer Javier Velasco (obviously called in to do the famous seduction dance Martha does with Nick towards the end of act two), Joe Kocurek for “Latin” (he must have been Dale Morris’s diction coach for the scenes in which George reads aloud in Latin), Angelica Ynfante for “prop gun” (the toy that shoots out a cloth sign that reads “Bang!”) and others, including Bedington and her husband Paul, for some of the decorations. The main credits include Matt Warburton for sound design (though this isn’t a particularly challenging show in that department), Mitchell Simkovski for lighting design (most notable in the brightening of the light on the window, house right, as day breaks during the final act), Jamie Lloyd as assistant director, George Bailey as stage manager (he’s also a performer, especially in musicals, and let’s hope Compass gives him a chance to play onstage), and Keith Miller as co-producer with Wride and Compass.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn’t exactly the play that leaps to mind when one thinks of community theatre — though Compass has made something of a specialty of David Mamet, an author whose coarse language and intense emotions wouldn’t have been allowed on stage had not Albee blazed the trail (their next production, opening November 5, is Mamet’s Boston Marriage), and the skills they’ve cultivated in their excursions into Mametland also serve them well here. Be warned, though, that Virginia Woolf is a long play — long enough that they’re starting it at 7:30, a half-hour earlier than usual, and it still doesn’t let out until quarter to 11. Back in 1962, apparently, a “full-length play” meant just that — not an 80-minute one-act!

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? plays through Saturday, October 24 at Compass Theatre, 3704 Sixth Avenue in Hillcrest. Performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are available by phone at (619) 688-9210 or online at www.compasstheatre.com

THEATER REVIEW: Compass' 'Virginia Woolf' packs powerful punch

PAM KRAGEN - pkragen@nctimes.com | Posted: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 10:35 am

Dale Morris, left, and Glynn Bedington from
Compass Theatre's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Sitting through Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" has never been what you'd call a cakewalk. The three-act, three-hour drama is an up-close look at a marriage that is hurtling furiously off the rails, but it's the kind of train wreck you can't help but watch.

A Review of the Compass Theater production of

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”

By Dennis W. Cox

Playing through October 24th at the Compass Theater.

I was not eager to watch “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” again. Although one of my favorite American plays, I had seen it on stage at the Old Globe less than 6 months ago.

The Old Globe production was flawless; so how do you improve on flawless? Happily, I was not bored, nor was I disappointed.

I attend the Compass productions on pretty regular basis; I like their choice of edgy, controversial and volatile material. You won’t see “Don’t Dress for Dinner” at the Compass. They take risks, and with the exception of that abortion about thieves and drug addicts, they reliably succeed.

Shana Wride, the director, obviously relished digging into first class material. From the excellent set to the remarkable ensemble casting, she makes astute decisions.

More famous as a writer and founder of the Compass Theater, I was curious at how skilled Dale Morris was an actor, in particular to play the downtrodden George. Dale played it very diffident at first, probably a wise choice, in order to shock us later with the strength of his fury.

The centerpiece of “Woolf” of course, is Martha, the vulgar harridan who enjoys destroying her husband, a little bit each day, slowly and surely. As the splendid Glynn Bedington plays it however, Martha doesn’t really enjoy the destruction that much. This Martha is tired, bored, drained; she is indeed ready for the final game.

Kelly Iverson plays Honey as a broad farcical joke. As she leaps about the Stage in her dance to Spring, we almost look forward to her destruction.

Tyler Herdklotz plays Nick. I think this is the best portrayal of Nick I’ve ever seen. By turns affable and aggressive, passive and combative, arrogant but not completely self-confident, this is a tour de force, but not at the expense of the ensemble. Nick is everyman, he is the audience really, a not so eccentric character in this opus. His exit at the end of the play, and his interrupted farewell, is wrenching and heavy with worthy alarm and humble repentance.

Speaking of repentance, Albee for all his cynicism and biting japery, believes in hope and renewal out of the fire and ashes of lies and bitterness that have been the borders of George and Martha’s relationship. Oh, yes, George recognizes this is the endgame, and Martha, though afraid, is not a coward.

Don’t be a cluck, buy your tickets now.

www.writeway.org

'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at Compass Theatre

Mutually assured destruction
By Jennifer Chung Klam
Posted on Fri, Oct 2nd, 2009
Last updated Fri, Oct 2nd, 2009

Domestic warfare has never been more thoroughly vile and engrossing than in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” During one long night’s journey into day, George and Martha rip off the pleasant mask of married life to reveal the mind games, mutual torment, disappointments and illusions beneath.

Compass Theatre, in an occasionally unwieldy yet compelling production, demonstrates the scathing drama still fascinates and disgusts in equal measures nearly five decades after its 1962 premiere. In its shoebox theater in Hillcrest, director Shana Wride foists the long-married couple’s relentless gamesmanship upon us, with little sense of relief or escape.

Which seems appropriate, since there’s no getting off this ride from hell for George and Martha, nor their younger guests.

In Albee’s Tony Award-winning play, George and Martha numb themselves from the disappointments of their marriage through alcohol and fantasy. The seasoned drunkards make savage sport of belittling and humiliating each other. But on this night, Martha ups the ante by inviting a young married couple over to witness and participate in the games. Nick and his mousy wife Honey are unprepared for their hosts’ booze-fueled vitriol. It’s unclear when George and Martha are telling the truth, but it hardly matters; their cutting remarks draw blood all the same.

George, a history professor at a small New England university, is befuddled, passive aggressive and meek – a result of years of hacking away by his saw of a wife. The university president’s daughter, Martha enjoys recapping her husband’s failures: his unpublished book, his inability to run the history department and the fruitless goal (hers more than his) to eventually take over the university. Their rancorous dialogue is at times grimly funny.

As George, Dale Morris shuffles across the stage, enfeebled physically, psychologically and verbally. His mannerism of speaking in an overly halting, bumbling way tends to throw off the calibrated tempo of Albee’s dialogue, particularly in the first act. But he contrasts this nicely with moments of ferocity and quiet determination as a man pushed over the edge in the increasingly corrosive second and third acts.

Glynn Bedington’s Martha explodes onto the modest living room set and barely lets up for the next three hours. Martha has a feline quality – it could be the playful kitten, the cougar on the prowl, or, more often than not, the tiger stripping meat from the bones of its prey. But Bedington also conveys Martha’s vulnerability, and by the final curtain the couple’s devastating diversion has stripped her of all vitality. Her quiet moments are in a way her most intense.

Tyler Joshua Herdklotz and Kelly Iverson certainly look the part of the tidy, handsome young couple obliged to watch the bloodsport from the sidelines. The ambitious Nick and his delicate and ditzy wife participate in their own illusions. For them the evening serves as a dire warning. However, cutting the interaction between George and Honey at the end of the second act – when she reveals that she never wanted children – diminishes her already underwritten character and self-awareness.

Costumes by Lisa Burgess and Adam Lindsay’s set help place the play in the 1960s.

The cast still seems to be finding its rhythm, and there are some plodding moments. But “Virginia Woolf” is a tough, exhausting play – on its cast and audiences – and Compass’ production is appropriately toxic and intoxicating.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By Hitch

Compass Theatre’s production of Edward Albee’s drama of domestic power struggle as metaphor for the dark underbelly of the American dream is a must –see theatrical experience.

The play runs Oct. 1 – 24 and tickets can be purchased from the box office at (619) 688-9210.  The website is www.CompassTheatre.com.  Do not miss this play!

Brilliantly acted and directed, this lengthy and intense play is worth every mesmerizing second of your time and attention.  Indeed, it would be impossible not to pay attention to characters so demanding, compelling, and skillfully brought to life.

Shana Wride , a twenty year veteran actor and director working primarily on the West Coast, directs this production and succeeds in bringing out wonderful performances by her four actors. This is her first collaboration with Compass and we hope it is but the first of many.  She was ably assisted by Jamie Lloyd.

Adam Lindsay created a set that absolutely evokes the period and the lifestyle of the inhabitants of the house. The lighting design by Mitchell Simkovski is subtle and effective.  Matt Warburton is the Sound Designer and Lisa Burgess, the Costume Designer, subtly defines the characters by their wardrobes.     

The story takes place over several hours in the home of George and Martha. Following a faculty party at the small New England college where George (Dale Morris) is an associate History professor and his disappointed wife Martha (Glynn Bedington) is the daughter of the president of the college, an impetuous invitation by Martha to the handsome new Biology professor Nick (Tyler Herdklotz) and his mousy wife Honey (Kelly Iversen) to come over for drinks at 2:00 in the morning leads these unsuspecting young people into the most uncomfortable and alarming social encounter imaginable.

Nick and Honey are about to descend into the toxic hell that is the married life of George and Martha.  She is a loud and shrewish harridan who apparently spends every available moment screaming at her husband about what a failure and a disappointment he is.   He is meek and subservient one moment, switching quickly to violent attack dog to join in what he refers to as a game – namely their endless rounds of abuse and debasement.

George and Martha are drunk when they get home from the first party and continue drinking non-stop for the rest of the night with their guests. They barely pause from drinking to draw breath except to hurl insults and accusations at one another, or to lure the two newcomers into their web of fantasy and illusion, exposing the lies at the heart of the marriage of Nick and Honey in the process. They are not satisfied with hurting each other and exercise their need to expose the failures and weaknesses of their new acquaintances along with their own.  

There are odd endearments interspersed with the invective, leading the viewer to wonder where all the malice comes from, since there are glimmers of affection.   Is the affection  dead or just methodically being buried?   At one point Martha reveals to Nick that George is the only man who has ever made her happy - so what happened?  Is it her incessant insistence that he be more ambitious, and possibly more talented, than he actually is at the heart of their trouble? Or was his willingness to marry her because she could improve his career prospects the root of the trouble?  Is it the fact that they could not have children, so invented one, the glue that held them together or the wedge that will finally destroy them?  It is the fact that Martha reveals the “existence” of their child to Nick that sets George off? This is an act he experiences as the ultimate betrayal – their fantasy life is theirs alone, not to be shared with an outsider.  He uses her indiscretion as an excuse to charm information from Nick and Honey that he uses as weapons on them later in the evening.

Nick and Honey are embryonic forms of the older couple, with a marriage built on lies and manipulation, motivated by their needs for protection and money.  They are not at all what they appear to be.  How will they end up?

In the end, with the “death” of their son, we are left to wonder if this is the turning point for George and Martha – if they can survive and rebuild a relationship in which they face reality and live with it.  Or whether too much time has passed and too much damage has been done.

This play demands a lot from the actors and the audience.  The actors deliver in spades.  The audience has the gift of time to savor the subtleties and layers of this superb piece of writing and directing.     

Do not miss this exciting production and don’t let your friends miss it either! 

American Gothic

THE SHOW: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” a drama by Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee, at Compass Theatre

If you wanted to start climbing, you wouldn’t begin with Everest. Then there’s Shana Wride. The long-term, well-regarded actor chose to make her first full-length foray into directing with one of the most challenging, punishingly difficult plays in the American canon: Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf!” And she did a spectacular job.

The intensity and brutality of the writing is overpowering enough; but in a small, tight space, you feel like you’re right there in George and Martha’s shabby living room, swept into their awful games of “Get the Guest” and “Hump the Hostess,” as they humiliate each other and their unsuspecting guests in one booze-soaked night of truth and illusion, revelation and degradation. The 1963 play won the Tony Award and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, but the award’s advisory board — the trustees of Columbia University — objected to the play’s then-controversial use of profanity and sexual themes, and no Drama Prize was given that year. Interestingly, there were no swear words in the original version. But for the 2004 revival, starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin (who won a Tony for his performance), Albee went back and revised the text, adding in the curses he couldn’t have written 40 years before and deleting one seminal scene, when the young “slim-hipped,” “mousy” wife, Honey, describes her avoidance of motherhood. When I asked him a few years ago why he did it, he said it “wasn’t necessary.” I thought it was the only scene that revealed her motivations.

The play still packs a whallop (with or without the profanity). This isn’t just a tale of two self-destructing marriages, one decadent and another decaying. It paints a bigger picture, of America, the American Empire. The central couple is named after our First Family. The confrontations between the two academics - the aging George, who teaches history, and strapping young Nick, who’s focused on biology, represent the eternal conflict between looking backward and forward, learning from the past vs. forging headstrong into the future, and the wonders (and horrors) of technology.

Most casts for the play are lopsided. It’s difficult to achieve a complete balance, with four actors who can successfully inhabit these enormously complex, multi-faceted characters. Wride has cast well, and there’s big payoff all the way through three riveting hours.

Glyn Bedington is spectacular as Martha, a blowsy, brash “floozy,” daughter of the president of the university who belittles her husband for being a failure and a disappointment, for not having gone further than associate professor, and not having taken over the whole college, as she’d hoped and planned. Martha has to be aggressive, sexual, feral and also vulnerable and deeply damaged. Bedington plays all the colors of the character with gleeful abandon and a taste for blood. As George, Dale Morris matches her tone for tone. He’s beleaguered and oppressed, but also wily and crafty, intelligent and conniving, able to out-game Martha and undermine his guests. George’s skillful manipulations and barely concealed venom are easier to play than his understanding and adoration of Martha. In its dysfunctional, warped way, this is a love story. Under Wride’s sensitive, muscular direction, Bedington and Morris display the couple’s playfulness and their underlying affection. That’s a masterful stroke all around.

Pat Launer

Tyler Herdklotz isn’t consistently potent as Nick, but he does show some spark in standing up to George. He could show the character’s nasty, calculating underside, to greater effect. Kelly Iverson, who’s blossoming as a performer, is a wonderful drunk as Honey, not half as whiney and annoying as Sandy Dennis was in the Academy Award-winning 1966 film that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (her best performance ever; both women won Oscars). Iverson’s strong throughout, stunning in several scenes (her dancing with uninhibited abandon, for instance). During the fight scene (nicely choreographed by Donal Pugh) she doesn’t quite reveal her darker side, her lust for violence.

The set (Adam Lindsay) is aptly detailed and dilapidated; the lighting (Michell Simkovsky) and sound (Matt Warburton) are fine. The only misfire is the costume design (Lisa Burgess), specifically, Martha’s supposedly sexy outfit, which should be a little outrageous, based on George’s sarcastically calling it her “Sunday chapel dress.” This Martha just wears black pants and a black, off-the-shoulder top, not at all the seductive get-up it should be.

These are minor quibbles. The play is one of the American greats. And amid all the brutality, it can be brutally funny. If you haven’t seen it in a while, you should. Even if you have (I saw Kathleen Turner’s performance, and frankly prefer Bedington’s!), this one’s a winner, and a must-see.

THE LOCATION: Compass Theatre, 3704 6^th Avenue. www.compasstheatre.com

THE DETAILS: Tickets: $20-$23.  Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., through October 24.

THE BOTTOM LINE: BEST BET