BCA's Woolf: Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid

Disheartening; heart-wrenching, and yet thoroughly hearty, Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" continues the gutsy Delvena Theatre Company's four-year investigation into the human love-organ. In the crammed seating of Leland Center, where the front-row audience members rest their legs on the worn Oriental rug that covers the entire set, there's no escaping the screaming, the whining and the drunken bodily noises that saturate the production. Heart-warming it is--for the most part--not.

The 1961 stage classic takes place in the timeless litter and scatter of academia: the lives and living room of a middle-aged New England university history professor and his slightly older wife. George (Robert Ayres) and Martha (Lynne Moulton) return at 2 a.m., sloshed, from yet another faculty get-together hosted by the president of the college--Martha's father.

The pair's catty and provocative banter heightens quickly into sneerful braying as Martha announces that, at daddy's request, she's invited a young couple over for a nightcap. The jocky, naively ambitious biology professor Nick (Roy Souza) and his cotton-candy wifelet Honey (Nicole Jesson) arrive amidst a jeering exchange of expletives. At first bubbling with apologies and awkwardness, they soon fall immediately into their hosts' manipulative and destructive games. Surrounded by a well-stocked bar and worn volumes on the shelves (including such too-apt titles as "The Possessed," "Illusions," "Gamesman" and "Father's Day"), the elder couple nastily unloads their marital bloody laundry, referring periodically to their never-present, elusive son, all the while extracting damaging confessions from Nick and Honey. As the evening progresses, the two couples' elaborately deceptive language descends, drink by drink, into the monosyllabism of pain and truth.

Albee once explained in an interview that he interprets the play title, which refers to the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?," as "Who's afraid of living life without false illusions?" All four characters cushion their own anxieties with closely guarded self-deceptions, and each eventually reveals himself to one of the other characters; this transformation, aided by alcohol, poses one of the greatest challenges for the four actors. Luckily all of the performances were at least adequate; however, Ayres and Moulton, playing the elder couple, are slightly more believable, or perhaps more energetic, throughout the course of the night. Ayres roars appropriately through lines like "I'm running this show!" as he conducts the latest game, "Get the Guests;" and he dryly combines hate, humbleness and irony as he retorts to Nick's accusation: "Because you're going to hump Martha, I'm disgusting?" The only break in Ayres' intensity occurred in the scene when George shoots Martha with what seems at first to be a shotgun, but releases only an umbrella; because of prop difficulties, Ayres had to shake the gun and quickly urge the gag out of the barrel--not quite the passionate moment it was supposed to be.

Moulton also adeptly portrays the transformation of Martha, screeching comments and complaints about anything from Bette Davis movies to the worst of her husband's pathetic qualities, then cooing sexual yet motherly come-ons at Nick, and finally, reduced to her befuddled, infantile core, gasping lines like "I'm cold" and "I don't know." Moulton's appearance and costume, however, tend toward the exaggerated side of middle-class, middle-aged skank, and it often lessens the plausibility and fluidity of some scenes. Albee describes Martha's character as "A large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger, ample, but not fleshy." Moulton hoofs around stage, frizzy red hair barely contained by a banana clip, more like a flouncy, black-bra-ed Roseanne than the saggy, sleazy yet sexy woman Liz Taylor portrays expertly in the 1966 Warner Bros. film adaptation.

As Honey and Nick, Jesson and Souza tackle somewhat more difficult roles, for their characters seem, at first, to lack any of the depth and inner turmoil of their elder colleagues. Honey hops into and through the production with an acebandaged ankle, a successful addition to the original script (Albee never calls for her injury), be it an intentional move by the director, George O'Keefe, or a lucky unintentional slip-and-fall by Jesson herself. Perhaps portraying a ditz is difficult, but Jesson's performance, while adequate, leans toward the uninspired. Hubby Souza exudes the young preppiness of a just-out-of-school teacher and athlete, with more interest in controlling the department than in actually imbuing the love of biology into his students. At first his Nick combines politeness, spite, and awkwardness, but as the bourbon bottle empties and the facades fade, Souza struggles to capture Nick's unleashing. The true emotion of his involvement in "Get the Guests" and "Hump the Hostess"--a selection of games from the evening--seems a bit too forced.

The Delvena Theatre Company's production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" climaxes expertly in a strangely heartening final scene, the game "Bringing up Baby." Stripped and exposed, Martha and George cling to each other, their future a possibility but their solitude a reality.