George and Martha Redux in ‘Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf’

By: Ben Brantley

Remember those vicious, bewildering party games played by the hosts in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Well, they just got a hell of a lot more complicated.

You see, this immortal play’s antagonistic spouses and prisoners of academe, George and Martha, have been transported from the early 1960s to the 21st century. And the borders between “truth and illusion,” to quote a favorite phrase of Martha’s, are zigzagging with a new ferocity that even they can’t keep up with.

Consider, for example, the very title of Kate Scelsa’s high- (and I mean high-) spirited new play, which opened on Tuesday night at Abrons Arts Center in an Elevator Repair Service production. It’s “Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf,” which would seem to indicate a serious sea change in the once-fearful Martha’s attitude.

Her full name, for the record, is now Martha Washington (Annie McNamara). Washington was her maiden name and it’s been adopted by her husband, George (Vin Knight). It seems that since these two first went mano a mano on Broadway in 1962 (and on screen in 1966), Martha has acquired a feminist confidence and conscience.

When they make their fabled entrance into their disheveled house, it’s George who now mutters discontentedly, “What a dump!” (That’s one of the few instances in which Albee is quoted directly.) As for Martha, anticipating the arrival of her unsuspecting guests, she enters singing blithely, “I’m totes cool with Virginia Woolf … I like how she was super gay.”

That rejiggered setup might suggest that this latest offering from the troupe that gave us the dazzling “Gatz” (after “The Great Gatsby”) is a dedicated work of political correction. Such a point of view is reflected in a dialogue in the program between Ms. Scelsa and John Collins, the director, that reaches the conclusion that Martha — as the agency-deprived creation of a male playwright — “must be avenged.”

Excerpt from “George and Martha Redux in ‘Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf” by Ben Brantley. Read the full article here.