The promotional posters for PlayMakers Repertory Company’s latest production, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” bill the drama as a “dysfunctional family slugfest for the holidays.”
That’s close to the truth, but confining the work to the holiday season is a disservice.
PlayMakers’ rendition of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is the type of well-crafted, finely-tuned ensemble piece that any theater company would kill to have on its calendar, period.
With brilliant performances from PlayMakers regulars Julie Fishell and Ray Dooley plus surprising and rewarding turns by two of UNC’s Masters in Fine Arts candidates, the work is a case study in theatrical excellence.
Edward Albee’s 1962 drama, a carefully paced boiler of a farce, centers around an emotionally destructive older couple and their young and unsuspecting evening guests.
Dooley and Fishell play George and Martha, an unhappily married couple living in a New England college town and regretting their lives of failure and forgotten promise.
After a faculty party, George and Martha play host to new professor Nick and his wife Honey, and proceed to drag the pair through a raucous evening of verbal jousting and withering emotional abuse.
The lies and secrets that play out through the evening lend the play a vague sense of dread.
But it is not for the plot that this play deserves attention.
Rather, it is for the powerful way the four actors rip each other apart with poise and an almost gleeful vitriol.
Dooley plays George as falsely meek, using soft tones and a slow build to mask his ultimate dominance of the bitter party’s social dynamic.