 |
Meredith Rensa as Martha, Matthew Brenher as George, Suzanne Dean as Martha and Dane Biren as Nick star in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ (photo by Alysa Brennan) |
The alcohol flows and personal demons are exposed when college professor George and his wife, Martha, have their own version of fun and games in front of two guests after a faculty party in the Tony Award-winning play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Nick, a fellow professor at the college where George teaches, and his wife, Honey, arrive at George and Martha’s residence around 2 a.m., but they have no idea what is in store for them in Edward Albee’s play that debuted on Broadway, Oct. 13, 1962.
The Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities opens its own production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with a gala opening Friday, Oct. 16, at the Hermosa Beach Playhouse. Directed by Stephanie Coltrin, the play stars Suzanne Dean as Martha, Matthew Brenher as George, Meredith Rensa as Honey and Dane Biren as Nick.
“Besides being a lot of words, it’s a dense play,” said Coltrin of the play’s challenge. “In my mind it’s maybe the masterpiece of the American theater. It’s so beautifully constructed and it’s a joy to get to do but it’s big. It’s so beautifully written you want to make sure you do it justice. We have short rehearsal periods here so it’s just trying to get it all in. Plus there’s a lot of character work you have to do and everything from conversations about what these conversations really are about to ‘how drunk am I at this point? Have we sobered up a little bit?’ Pinpointing all of these things is so much detail work that it’s fun to do but time-consuming of course.”
Dean calls Martha “incredibly complicated” who is “fragile underneath” but usually only shows her “hard outside.”
“She’s angry about life,” Dean said. “She has a lot of loss and sadness. I think she obviously enjoys the game that they play. It’s really the only life that she gets. She’s determined to top him every chance that she gets to insult him, ridicule him, because she is so unhappy with the fact that he has settled for this life, this life with her, that he accepted her, that he settled for her. So she hates him for it. She hates herself. It’s the dynamic of two people who have lived in the same closed environment for a really long time. They have a tremendous amount of mutual loss as well as individual loss, dissatisfaction with life, all of that.”
With 20 years of stage experience, including a host of Shakespearean productions, British actor Brenher said playing George is the “biggest challenge” of his career.
“He’s a man who hasn’t fulfilled his potential and maybe that’s enough for him,” Brenher said. “He’s somebody who has been an also-ran, he’s not quite reached the summit especially from early expectations. He’s deeply flawed and I believe that he possibly has certain regrets and his past has a few skeletons in the cupboard if you know what I mean. The relationship he has with Martha is very volatile. They love each other deeply but I think they are so bored with their routine, their existence, they find ways of amusing themselves. They invent games and they kind of perpetrate the games on people that are ignorant of what is really gong on around them. It’s a cross between reality and fantasy so it’s nothing unusual that human beings aren’t capable of but with these guys it goes to extremes.”
Caught in the crossfire of George and Martha are Nick and Honey.
“He’s very ambitious and he is very career-oriented,” said Biren of Nick. “He is there for the evening to further himself and it’s maybe not something that he would have chosen to do as a social outing but he’s got to impress the big guns and feels it necessary to go along with these late-night shenanigans.”
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” has caused controversy from its first performance due to its use of profanity and sexual themes. It won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama but the award’s advisory board objected. No award was given for drama that year. But the play did win a Tony Award for best play that year and its stars, Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, took home best actress and actor. A film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols, that cut about an hour of the original play, was released in 1966 starring then-husband and wife Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as well as George Segal and Sandy Dennis. The entire cast was nominated for Oscars, as well as the film, but Taylor and Dennis took home the trophies. The play was revived in 2004 for Broadway with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in the title roles.
The 81-year-old Albee, who continues to write, still has a final say in the casting of his play.
“He asks for casting approval for everything,” Biren said. “They send him our info and they send him the director’s info and he has to approve you. He’s very specific with who gets cast in the show and all that. He approved us and allowed us to go on with the show and gave us the rights. That’s an honor in itself.”
Clocking in around three hours long, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” has comedic elements mixed in numerous tense moments that the actors say are challenging to them. With less than three weeks of rehearsal, Coltrin said that was a big mountain to climb.
“You have to find those points when are you really angry, at what point are you condescending and these people turn on a dime,” Coltrin said. “They literally will be sweet one minute and flip around the next second so sometimes we have to stop every line and talk about what that is right there because even within a three-sentence paragraph, they’ll have three different intentions.”
Dean added, “There’s also a lot of humor and we’re struggling to try to bring that to the surface so it’s not all about just the intense anger and violence. To play those other levels and the wry humor that these people can experience together and bring out of each other, it’s a very complicated play to put up in three weeks, more complicated than your average play. It’s also three hours long so it’s very physically challenging, vocally challenging, and we’re trying to support each other as much as we can.”
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” will have a final preview Thursday, Oct. 15, at 8 p.m. before the opening Friday, Oct. 16, at 8 p.m. The regular schedule is Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m. There will be Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Oct. 18 and 25. A Sunday evening performance at 7 p.m. will take place Oct. 18. The show closes Sunday, Oct. 25, with the 2 p.m. matinee. |
