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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?

by Edward Albee
review by Brad Rosenstein in the SF Bay Guardian August 18, 1999

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'Woolf': be afraid

I only made it through the first act of AvidFan Productions' Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee's play is such an
ur-classic, it's hard to know what anyone could add to it, but I was
curious. Director Aïda Jones has created stirs with her
gender-bending productions, but her casting for Woolf accedes to
Albee's gender-appropriate demands. However, instead of the
paunchy protagonists one expects, we get a cast as youthful as
that of Rent.

Saturday Night Live once did a sketch in which Death of a
Salesman was performed by eighth graders, and this Woolf
approaches that level of absurdity. Carolyn Bates has got to be the
only buff Martha in the history of the play's production, and Arye
Rosenschein's otherwise callow George has his hair sprayed gray
like a character actor in a high school play. Both seem to have
modeled their performances on the Burton-Taylor movie, and the
comparisons are not flattering.

Bates has a certain acerbic strength, but none of the cast seems
clued in to what the play is really about, and it's not surprising:
these actors are about as distant from middle-aged anomie as
you can get. Jones has directed the proceedings more like an
Ionesco farce, and the cast speed through their speeches so
quickly that most of Albee's depth, nuance, and wicked humor get
completely obliterated. The thought of watching this crew flail
through two more acts of exorcised pain was too much for me. But
I did wonder why anyone would tackle this masterpiece without a
concept and a cast to match.

'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Through Aug. 28. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.
(also Mon/23, 8 p.m.) Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, S.F. $10. (415)
982-6422.

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