Archives for December 31, 2010

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report from Chicago on the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It is a very great production. Here’s an excerpt.
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When not writing plays like “August: Osage County” and “Killer Joe,” Tracy Letts acts. In David Cromer’s 2005 Off-Broadway staging of Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow,” he played an effete, stuttering drama critic; in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 2009 Chicago revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” he played a sleazy penny-ante thief. This time around he’s playing George, the hard-drinking, switchblade-tongued small-town professor who is at the molten center of Steppenwolf’s new production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It’s a part that couldn’t be more different from the others in which I’ve seen Mr. Letts, and what he does with it makes me wonder whether there’s a better character actor to be found on the American stage today.
What is most striking about Mr. Letts’ performance, though, is that it doesn’t stand out from the rest of this remarkable show. Instead, Mr. Letts is part of an ensemble cast whose four members, directed with uncommon subtlety by longtime Albee collaborator Pam MacKinnon, function as an exquisitely well-coordinated ensemble in which nobody ever makes a false move. In the wrong hands, “Virginia Woolf” can come off as a hysterically overwrought insult marathon. In the hands of Mr. Letts, Amy Morton, Carrie Coon and Madison Dirks, it feels as though you’re sitting quietly in a corner of the room, watching four people get tight, shed their inhibitions and admit to themselves and one another that their hopes and dreams have come to naught….
A note for East Coast theater buffs: Steppenwolf’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” will transfer to Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, where it will be performed as part of Arena Stage’s Edward Albee Festival. Whether in Chicago or Washington, it’s a show you mustn’t miss.
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Read the whole thing here.
In 1962 Columbia Masterworks recorded a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Arthur Hill, Uta Hagen, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon, the four members of the original Broadway cast. Here’s an excerpt from that album, which has been out of print for decades:

Glynis Johns and Len Cariou sing “Send in the Clowns,” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music:

Man is a victim of dope

In the incurable form of hope.

Ogden Nash, “Good-by, Old Year, You Oaf or Why Don’t They Pay the Bonus?”