By Doug Shanaberger
for the Observer-Reporter
Taboo is a word I don't recall hearing before I hit my teen years, but every time my mother turned off the TV and said "You're too young to watch that," I must have known instinctively what taboo meant.
I'm referring to the early '70s, after all, when parents took the "Parental Guidance Suggested" warning seriously and when my mother refused to let me, at age 12, watch the movie made from Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"? Its themes were too adult, its language too coarse, its characters hardened and soured by emotions I wasn't mature enough to comprehend.
If I wanted to watch the movie (and being disobedient where movies were concerned, I watched it twice), I had to sneak into my sister's bedroom and watch it on her set, with the sound turned down so low that Elizabeth Taylor's snarling delivery became a series of whispered commands.
It's funny to associate sentimental feelings with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," perhaps the most verbally brutal and least sentimental play written for the American stage - as you'll see from the respectful new production Michael Moats directs at Off the Wall Theater.
Tears are shed, but they come after the long-married George and Martha have subjected their middle-of-the-night guests, the newlyweds Nick and Honey, to an alcohol-fueled Walpurgisnacht that forces the meek to protect themselves against the savages. And they aren't crocodile tears, no matter how many teeth Martha bares. They're real tears, made so by the despair, frustration and longing that devour the older couple, turning them into predatory game players.
It took guts for Off the Wall to tackle "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" today, when the 46-year-old play's notoriety exists in the past and its title hasn't even a smidgen of the former drawing power. That's what I find as heartbreaking as the fantasy George destroys while Martha screams "You can't do that!" Albee wrote a masterpiece, one deserving a place among the great American dramas, and yet, as with Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," most current theatergoers don't know it.
So at Off the Wall, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" emerges as a labor of love in Moats' hands and as a chance to revisit a play that is, like Martha, something other than what it seems. A flawless revival it's not, though it generously gives as much as it unintentionally sacrifices.
For instance, Virginia Wall Gruenert's Martha doesn't have the ferocious drive, the triumphant meanness. Yes, she's spoiled, calculating, childish, and domineering, with a fishwife laugh that echoes down Main Street and reaches points beyond. But if Martha's monstrous nature conflicts with the actress's warmth and affability, Gruenert still comes through beautifully in many key moments. Look how vulnerable she is, how defeated at the end, when Martha can no longer use her illusions for security.
Scott Sortman does a credible job as George, making the character an underachieving academic and emasculated mate. I only wish his George sparred with more energy and that, vocally, he'd give as good as he gets. At the performance I attended, while Gruenert hungrily bit into Martha's lines, Sortman quietly swallowed George's. Albee has trusted you with sarcastic and hurtful words, man. Speaking under your breath isn't an option.
Chris Bondi correctly plays Nick as a hungry opportunist, while Jessica D'Arcy is awfully young, sometimes touchingly so, as Honey.
As for Moats' staging, I do have complaints: The tidy set for George and Martha's living room doesn't represent the couple's messy relationship; Martha, who should appear restless, is confined to a chair far too often; and the three-hour play needs to move more explosively than it does.
It's not a flawless revival, as I wrote earlier. But it's an honorable "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and if the Off the Wall actors are brave enough to offer this husband-and-wife throwdown, audiences should be brave enough to watch it.