I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf? Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, early in the morning.....

This little ditty, which starts out as an attempt to remember funnier times, becomes, over the course of a few hours, the haunting theme song of some of the most despicable and tragic characters to ever grace the stage. In Edward Albee's seminal play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, now going on at The Jungle theater in Uptown Minneapolis, the play's three-hour duration simply flies by. Who can think about time, or anything else outside the darkened theater for that matter, when the lives of four people are being eviscerated on the stage in front of you?

It is perhaps the most violent play I've ever seen, and yet there is never a drop of blood spilled. Daggers are thrown verbally between each character, hitting their mark each time, and every highball glass that is strewn around Bain Behlke's fitting set might as well have been one part gin, two parts arsenic, because with every drink the audience can see what is left of Albee's tragic characters slipping away.

It would not suffice to call The Jungle's production "astounding." The magnificent mounting of the play, spearheaded by Bain Behlke and starring Michelle Barber, Stephen Yoakum, Sean Michael Dooley (filling in for Sean Neely, who was sidelined due to a medical emergency), and Jane Froiland, was sickening, and also one of the BEST I've ever had the pleasure of seeing.

The play, written by Albee in 1962, takes place between 2 a.m. and dawn at the home of George (Yoakam) and Martha (Barber), a middle-aged married couple who have invited young newcomers Nick (Dooley) and Honey (Froiland) over for a drink after a faculty mixer put on by Martha's father, the president of the university the men teach at. Over the next few hours, George and Martha succeed in plunging to new lows in their own volatile relationship while pulling Honey and Nick down with them. This is not to say that the rift created between Honey and Nick is solely because of the older couple's actions: in the production, Behlke succeeds in showing the audience that although Nick and Honey seem naive, happy, and fresh-faced when they walk in George and Martha's door, there is almost as much bubbling under the surface of their relationship as there is with the other pair - who spend half the production verbally abusing one another.

The play is scathingly funny, and despite the relationship bloodbath that is in progress, the talented actors managed to draw a laugh out of the audience whenever Albee's intelligent dialogue called for it. Speaking of the talent of the play's cast, it would be wholly unfair not to recognize what REALLY had me on the edge of my seat for three hours: Stephen Yoakam and Michelle Barber. I have never had the pleasure of seeing either of these Twin Cities mainstays in action before, and after seeing their work in Virginia Woolf, I feel I have been cheating myself from the best of what our fair cities have to offer. Barber was both frail and vulnerable and a legitimate ball-crusher at many times throughout the play. Where many actors would have failed at their attempt to exude Martha's scathing wit and callousness, Barber was able to use her physical presence and vocal authority to bring each and every verbal bitch-slap to life. She was as believable as they come - which she was able to do in no small part because of the believability that Albee infused into the play's intense and never-ending dialogue. The characters speak as if they were having a real conversation - something that may seem obvious, but that few scripts or screenplays are able to actually accomplish.

As George, Stephen Yoakam was able to transition perfectly and timely through each and every phase his character visits throughout the night. It is difficult to play one character, much less several throughout a play - and although George remained George, Yoakam was sure to keep his portrayal of the washed-up historian in exactly the spot he needed to be at exactly the right time. If ever someone had a perfect voice for the stage, it is Yoakam. If at any point in the show I became distracted, it was because I was concentrating too hard on how Yoakam delivered his lines - to someone with a musical affinity like mine, it was a joy to listen to.

Not to call out the two lead actors specifically, because Sean Dooley and Jane Froiland did a fantastic job in their own right. Dooley played Nick as the curious youngster - attracted to Martha, nay, anything with breasts, while both physically shunning his own wife and being hyper-aware of anything that came out of her mouth at the same time. Dooley shone in the part, and his natural affinity with Albee's lines and their directed delivery (lines he had less than one week to learn, mind you) was impressive.  Although Froiland occasionally became cartoonish in her portrayal of Honey, she succeeded beautifully in following Honey through the many stages her character visits after she has a few glasses of brandy and the ugly side of her relationship with Nick. Although Albee only hints at it in his dialogue, Froiland also succeeds in bringing attention to a dimension of Honey that many Virginia Woolf audiences never get to see - her probable history of sexual abuse, when, wide-eyed and fear-stricken, Honey drunkenly believes she is somewhere else, in a memory where she screams "I don't want to anymore, get away."

The Jungle's production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is theater at its best, and the entire cast, crew, and the production staff deserve the credit they clearly worked very hard for. I encourage everyone to go see it for themselves - and to leave some time after the play for decompression and thought about this pivotal work in American theater, done, I believe, how Edward Albee would have wished.

For more information, and tickets, go to The Jungle's website.

-K