Edward Albee’s classic dust-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” may now be eligible for AARP — this new Broadway revival opened Saturday, the play’s 50th anniversary — but it’s a model of wrinkle-free aging. The story, in which two married couples share a boozy, increasingly unhinged night, has lost none of its power to keep an audience on edge.
Indeed, while set in the early 1960s, this very good new production, which originated at Chicago’s Steppenwolf a couple of years ago, could easily take place now.
Partly this has to do with the performances, whose balance of thoughtfulness and instinct give them a sense of relatable immediacy. Quite a feat, considering the central, older pair, a college history professor named George and his wife, Martha, can easily slide into almost campy, brawling drunks.
Under the direction of Pam MacKinnon (“Clybourne Park”), they are played by Tracy Letts — an experienced actor but better known in New York as the author of “August: Osage County” and “Bug” — and Amy Morton, who scored a Tony nomination as the beleaguered elder daughter in “August.” They approach the characters as flesh-and-blood creatures, rather than archetypes of a sap and a gorgon.
The traditional take on George and Martha is that he endures her alcohol-soaked abuse more or less passively, then turns the tables on her — it takes a bit more than three hours and a pair of intermissions to get there.
But from the very beginning, Letts’ George is hiding in plain sight. He looks like a milquetoast despised by a domineering wife, who happens to be the daughter of the college’s president — she derisively calls him a “a big fat flop.”
But actually George is a master of passive aggression. When he seemingly backs away from a barb, his body language suggests he’s not cowed in the least. And when he tells Martha: “I warn you,” it’s a genuine threat.
Witness to this sparring are a handsome new biology professor, Nick (Madison Dirks), and his wife, Honey (Carrie Coon). They have dropped by for drinks, only to become trapped in a Möbius strip of mental and physical warfare — George involves them in perverse parlor games he dubs “Hump the Hostess” and “Bringing Up Baby.”
But while the show is extremely accomplished, this is yet another naturalistic production of a play that’s not.
So yes, Todd Rosenthal’s set gives us a realistic shabby-academic living room, strewn with books and reeking of crushed hopes.
And yes, the cast is uniformly excellent, mining deep veins of psychological accuracy.
But fabrication, delusion and manipulation are integral to the play. Like Beckett and his existentialist comic nightmares, Albee mines a pitch-black absurdism. Fifty years on, and he’s still one step ahead of Broadway.