Review: Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf at Dublin Theatre Festival

By: Chris McCormack

While making conversation with her guests, Martha, a fast-talking intellectual discussing gender issues with near-erotic intensity, makes a confession. “I’m a horrible person,” she says, oddly self-assured. This mightn’t have been expected of the same Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, who loses the upper hand when reminded she can’t conceive a child. But in Kate Scelsa’s magnificently surreal comedy, if that makes her awful, so be it.

Written for Elevator Repair Service’s terrific ensemble, Scelsa’s reworking of Albee’s drama is still set in the home of a warring college professor and his wife, but embraces more of the irony: if their names allude to America’s founders, why not name them Martha and George Washington? If guests Nick and Honey are there to push for a promotion, why be shy about it?

Within seconds of her arrival, Annie McNamara’s quicksilver Martha brushes past several plot points and character notes, as if to bring the hidden resentments and imaginary presences from the previous drama into light. That’s an interesting coincidence; after The Lost O’Casey, The Misfits and The Patient Gloria, Martha isn’t the first woman at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival to feel like she’s been here before.

Reinvention is to be found everywhere here, in director John Collins’s excellent production. George, made diva-like by Vin Knight, lounges about like a Southern Belle. Gavin Price’s Nick reveals a passion for slash fiction and its gay characters. Even the unfailingly polite Honey, in April Matthis’s well-judged performance, gets a moment to detest her suburban-wife life.

The script hums with smart non sequiturs, pop cultural references and meta-theatrical lines (characters will sooner retreat into the gender-problematic worlds of Tennessee Williams rather than hang around here). It may sound quite the departure but, impressively, Albee’s mind games and comforting illusions are still in here.

Excerpt from “Review: Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf at Dublin Theatre Festival” by  Chris McCormack. Read the full article here.