A Good Fright

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Directed by Lisa Freinkel

Lowell House Junior Common Room March 7-9

OVERWHELMING THE LOWBUDGET staging of Junior Common Room vinyl, the Lowell House Drama Society renders an impressive performance of Edward Albee's classic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. A cosy setting without lights, curtain or stage serves to bring the audience right into the living room with sparring couple George (Daniel Zelman) and Martha (Alicia Rubin), and their tortured guests Nick (Aaron Carlos) and Honey (Jane Loranger).

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which has been called Long Night's Journey Into Day, carries us through the fun and games of boozy, castrating Martha, daughter of a small-college president, and her bitter husband George, who is "in the History Department instead of being the History Department." At 2:30 a.m., George and Martha have visitors, a miscast Aaron Carlos as up-and-coming young biologist, Nick, and his mousy wife Honey, brilliantly acted by Jane Loranger.

In the course of the evening, Nick and Honey grow to be old hands at George's and Martha's form of verbal warfare/lovemaking through a series of parlor games: Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess, and, finally and most deadly, Bringing Up Baby. None of the characters is spared by the scalpel of these not-so-playful plays. Father-killing, mother-killing, baby-killing--all are dredged up for common consumption.

LISA FREINKEL DOES an excellent job of directing a simply organized play which encompasses complicated themes. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is an extremely difficult one for a college cast to tackle, because, simply speaking, it is a middle-aged play. The actors with whom most viewers will associate the characters from Who's Afraid are Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who seemed to live their parts in the movie version.

Aside from several key scenes where the actor's back is to the audience, space is used well. The actors toss themselves (and other objects) across the stage with abandon, fully expressing the play's physicality. Felman and Rubin both overcome their age handicap, warming to their parts by the second act so that we really believe that George is "fortyish but looks 55" and Martha, six years older than that.

AARON CARLOS GIVES a lackluster performance as the strong and relatively silent Nick, a problem compounded by his slight build and hennaed hair, which do not fit the image of the All-American middleweight champ on the make. This is disconcerting, but rarely diverts our attention from the drama of George and Martha.

What does threaten to turn our gaze from the central action between host and hostess is the shining performance of Jane Loranger. Loranger plays Honey not merely as a drab, "slim-hipped" hanger onto Nick, but as a mostly-clueless waif with occasional but unspoken real glimmers of insight. She delivers lines like "Oh yes, [Nick] has a very firm body" deadpan, and "I don't want any children, I don't want any hurt" with a hysterical intensity that brings on the shivers.

All in all, one could compare Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to an all-night Master's Sherry with the stops pulled out--fill your drinks and fasten your seat belts, academia is not all fun and games.