At Shotgun, ‘Virginia Woolf’ is still scary

An LED-lit bar stocked with bottles and tinctures of every shade — royal purple and amber, aqua and sickly green — sits behind a wooden floor with a midcentury parquet pattern, and that floor is completely empty.

Edward Albee’s drama — which was recommended for the Pulitzer Prize in 1963 but deemed too indecent to win it — is often housed in a cluttered, crusty library of a sitting room to match the middle-aged couple who reside in it:

What’s initially distracting about the set isn’t just the departure from design tradition but how it allows director Mark Jackson and his four-person ensemble to break conventions of stage composition and physical interaction.

[...] “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” isn’t a comfortable play, and as you try to settle in to its three hours of excruciating mind games, manipulative wordplay and, more than 50 years later and a month after the playwright’s death, still incisive attack on bourgeois norms, the physical arrangement of the actors starts to look more normal and in fact cannily suited to the play.

In Ball and Jackson’s vision, the characters are not in a living room but a barren landscape, like that of a Dalí painting, so isolated from the rest of the world that maybe there isn’t a world outside to escape to at all.

[...] even on the night when the play is set — a night that might mark the final blow to their marriage, a night which begins at 2 in the morning, when Martha invites Honey and Nick over for drinks after a faculty party — the pair still take deep joy in each other’s quick wits, the special idiom they’ve built over the years, an idiom only they can speak, one with which they elevate themselves and pull the rug out from under everyone else.

In Wilmurt’s and Sinaiko’s renderings, however, George and Martha don’t create the erotic tension that’s supposed to help fuel their nightlong — their lifelong — war.

A longtime Shotgun artist, she is always a performer of acute intelligence and focus, but the sloppiness in Martha’s character that makes her speak and behave like a wild animal don’t feel at home in this actor.