ERS Artistic Director John Collins and “Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf” playwright Kate Scelsa sat down over a couple of glasses of wine at a cafe to discuss the project.

Kate Scelsa: So, John! I’ve worked with this company for almost fifteen years...

John Collins: (makes a sound of distress at the inevitable passage of time)

KS: ...as a performer, as a company member, collaborator...

JC: Company manager.

KS: And now I’ve written a play for the company.

JC: Yes.

KS: How do you feel about that?

JC: Well, it’s exciting for me because I’m getting to work with one of my favorite novelists, who wrote one of my favorite books of the past couple of years.

KS: Thank you for that plug.

JC: It’s like you’ve been doing stealth research for fifteen years on what would be perfect parts for some of our actors. How often do you get to see a play written by someone who knows the actors so intimately, so perfectly, that she can genuinely just write a play by channeling them?

KS: That’s how it felt writing it. It feels almost invasive.

JC: Right. You are stealing five souls. And putting them onstage.

KS: It does feel like a kind of witchcraft that could be used for evil, but these particular people seem okay with it.

JC: It’s definitely evil. But we’re all complicit in this extraordinary act of terrifying evil.

KS: And working with the idea of being inspired by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” came originally from me and Vin often playing a couple in ERS shows, and doing a sort of George and Martha dynamic, even off stage. And the two of us coming to the conclusion that one day we had to do something with this play.

JC: You’ve been able to do something that I can’t really do with the normal process, because I’m not a writer and I’m waiting for material to come along. Normally we go through this insane exercise of forcing that material onto our company members. It’s like we’re putting some clothes on them that don’t fit, and we create these amazing new fashions by having them tear their way through the thing they’re trying to wear, or get swallowed up by it because it’s too big.

KS: I like that metaphor.

JC: But you got to do the thing of just saying, “We’re going to give these people exactly what they need to be doing onstage.” That, in a way, is long overdue for this company.

KS: I’m realizing just as we’re talking about it, and this is going to sound very sentimental, but this play feels kind of like a love letter to these people and to this company.

JC: It almost feels like the majority of my work on this show was done over the course of fifteen years, just by bringing you all together.

KS: It actually turns out that this will have been the longest development process of any show you’ve ever done.

JC: Right. Starting in 2002.

KS: So how would you describe this project?

JC: This is all of the energy and insanity and aggressive entertainment of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” rearranged, tweaked, turned up, and fixed. This is using everything wonderful about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” against it.

KS: There’s your tag line.

JC: Celebrating it, blowing it up, surgically ripping it to shreds, and birthing a triumphant new way of seeing those people. Albee’s play and your play both take on this idea of the imaginary birth, this hysterical pregnancy... this play is “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”’s own hysterical pregnancy.

KS: Oh my god. This is the fake baby that George and Martha had.

JC: That’s what this is. It is an amazing act of critique, of parody, of destruction, and rebirth, exacted on this very famous play. And what’s amazing about it is that, in tearing it down and rebuilding it, it does what the original does even better, even more.

KS: I’ll take it.

JC: And gets it right.

KS: (Laughing) Good. And what we’re raising money for now is for this development period, to get it on its feet. So we can show it to some people.

JC: We’re seizing the moment. We’ve got everybody on board, there’s a ton of enthusiasm, we’re all raring to go. In just beginning to work on it, we already know what an amazingly hot thing we’ve got on our hands. And we need people to join us. This is a big jumpstart.

KS: And support right now will help us to pay these awesome actors, pay for rehearsal space, so that we can do a work-in-progress showing in December and hopefully find a home for it.

JC: This is creating a launch pad for an amazing project. As much as it’s a critique of Albee’s play, it’s also a response, it’s picking up where Albee left off. This is Martha’s revenge.

KS: Right. I’m really interested in these iconic female characters that do stick around for such a long time because we love them, and actresses love to play them because they’re so much fun. I also reference Tennessee Williams a lot in my play, and I’m interested very specifically in this phenomenon of gay male authors writing these outrageous, over the top female characters as almost stand-ins for a part of themselves, and what happens when they then destroy those women? Why do those incredible, iconic characters need to be destroyed?

JC: This is you saying, “What if they’re not the destroyed, but the destroyers?”

KS: Right! Because I do think that Martha is this incredible feminist character in that, for the majority of Albee’s play, she and her husband are on equal footing. And the fact that in the end of Albee’s play Martha is defeated has always been so heartbreaking to me. It doesn’t even really ring true. She’s defeated by the idea of motherhood. And it’s this gotcha moment for both Martha and the audience. Like, “Oh, you thought she was this doesn’t-give-a-fuck broad? Nope! It’s all just because she wasn’t able to have a baby!” There was something in me that needed to re-think that and re-write that.

JC: Making this the ultimate fan fiction for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

KS: That’s exactly right. My play is “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ” fan fiction. And fan fiction is also a big theme in my play. Specifically slash fiction, where mostly straight women writers live out a fantasy of male queerness. Almost the opposite of what we’re saying about what Albee’s doing with Martha in taking on a kind of female diva doppelgänger for himself.

JC: Your play is what happens when a gay man writes strong, amazing female characters, and then a gay woman gets ahold of them.

KS: I love that. Yes, the idea of a conversation happening here about representation. And as someone who has gotten to play some really outrageous characters, I think about these issues with representation of strong female characters a lot. Especially with a character like Frances in “The Select (The Sun Also Rises).” With Frances I never wanted her to seem unsympathetic, but she’s so outrageous and so undeniably too much. But then can that woman also be sympathetic? Can you still love her? Or is she just reduced to being “the shrew?”

JC: And what are we being told by the fact that these women whose theatrical anger inspires us so much are ultimately undone by that power? Why can’t that be the thing that makes them soar to triumph?

KS: Yes.

JC: Here we are going through this time where, as we speak, we’re a little more than a week away from possibly electing the first female president of the United States, who, if she’s not elected, it will be at least partly, if not mostly, because too many people thought, “A woman can’t be powerful and angry.”

KS: “She’s not nice. She’s not charming. She’s not fun.”

JC: This is an important national narrative right now.

KS: There’s an assumption that gets made about how far we’ve come with feminism and with our ideas about women and how they’re “allowed” to act and what they’re “allowed ” to achieve, and there’s a point at which we get ahead of ourselves. Because there are still certain basic ideas about womanhood that have not been examined. And to really examine them you have to go into these cultural representations, and say, “Why is this accepted?” Martha was someone who seemed so ahead of her time, and now she would have a career. She would be the shining star in that relationship. And there’s so much truth in Albee’s play about why that isn’t happening for her that still exists now, and still exists in the way that we think about women and about powerful women.

JC: What you’re doing with your Martha is just going straight at these things. There’s no tiptoeing around those traits that more often than not are presented as the reason a woman is strong and also the reason she fails. You take this Martha who’s an extreme character - scary, domineering...

KS: And doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks of her.

JC: Whether or not Albee intended for her strength to be her undoing, or just for her strength to be irrelevant to her fate because this other thing was going to pull her down, her not being a mother, not being a “traditional ” woman in a certain sense, whether he meant to say that about her or not, we think that is what he said. We think that’s what his play says. And this is about reclaiming that.

KS: The truth is, Albee’s play doesn’t end with both of them destroyed. The play ends with her destroyed and with George having the upper hand. That’s a pretty strong statement to take in when you’ve been watching this battle of equals.

JC: Your play is simultaneously an incredibly reverent homage to this character and a very stern critique of Albee’s play. But there is a lot of love for Edward Albee here.

KS: If he didn’t get so much right, there wouldn’t be any point in even having a conversation about it. Because there’s so much that seems so modern about his play, and so fun and theatrically thrilling. To have a play from the sixties feel like that now, there’s not a lot that can measure up to that. But it’s the fact that that he got so much right that makes me furious about what he got wrong.

JC: If he hadn’t created such a powerful character, then it would be less consequential what ends up happening to her. And that’s what creates the demand for your play. She’s a powerful character...

KS: Who must be avenged.

JC: Yes. Martha must be avenged.

#everyonesfinewithvirginiawoolf

Photo by Brad Buehring