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Watching them interact with the older couple, one gets the uncomfortable premonition that Nick and Honey one day could turn into George and Martha-and indeed, they’re already on their way. They seem less unequal, less childish, than their predecessors in these roles. This changes everything.īecause of the humanizing frame this directorial choice has put around the drama, the characters of Nick and Honey ( Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon), acquire new importance. Martha seems capable of tenderness George of love for her, however buried. In the Steppenwolf production, directed by Pam McKinnon, it’s George who’s the alpha. Her raw-scraped humanity changes the role of George (played by Letts), who in other productions has generally played bitchy, faded beta male (Richard Burton, Bill Irwin) to the leading alpha female. As Martha, Amy Morton (last seen on Broadway in August: Osage County, the Tony-winning play by Tracy Letts that garnered her a Tony nod for her performance) is angry, willful, supremely vulnerable, and painfully recognizable as an actual woman. This is in no way meant to diminish the force of their portrayals, but it does make for a different kind of play than the one that now erupts on Broadway. In past productions, the role of Martha has been played by actors-Uta Hagen, Elizabeth Taylor, Kathleen Turner-who exude such titanic, monstrous charisma that they don’t come across as typical, or even as possible, wives they’re more like an earthquake, or a fleshquake, than like a woman anyone has ever met.
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In the course of one vertiginous, drunken evening, they play a vicious game of cat-and-mouse with a young couple who drop in after an office party-a new faculty member named Nick, and his innocent, flighty wife, Honey-but they save the kill for each other. In this searing play-a nightmare in three acts by Edward Albee, whose fame it instantly secured-a middle-aged college professor, George, and his (six years older) middle-aged wife, Martha (the daughter of the college’s president) demonstrate that they have failed in everything except in their ability to wound one another. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway on Saturday, exactly 50 years after its Broadway debut (on October 13, 1962), but the drama that rampages at the Booth Theater feels brand-new.