The Men Are Not Fine in Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf

By: Pete Hempstead

Few female characters of the theater have risen to the iconic status of Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Martha — loud, brash, and unwilling to put up with her unambitious husband, George — at first seems like a powerful female force, but ultimately George vanquishes her with a crushing reminder of her failure to live up to society’s ultimate expectation for women: motherhood.

Kate Scelsa has a bone to pick with Albee in this regard, and she picks deep in her sidesplitting new comedy Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf, now running at the Abrons Arts Center in a production by Elevator Repair Service, the company known for marathon shows like Gatz. At a lean 75 minutes, Scelsa’s witty, trenchant parody of Albee’s play packs a thesis-worth of critique on the way men perceive and portray skewed images of women through the distorted lens of the American patriarchy.

Scelsa upsets Albee’s gender dynamics from the get-go when George Washington (a maniacally funny Vin Knight) enters a clothes-strewn, 1960s-style living room with dead plants in the corner and dejectedly utters, “What a dump” (one of Martha’s first lines in Albee’s play). Then like a whirlwind, in comes his sexually uninhibited wife, Martha (played with relentless energy by Annie McNamara), singing “I’m totes cool with Virginia Woolf. She’s my bitch. I love her. I like how she was super gay. La la la de da,” before informing George that a couple is coming over. “I think there’s a chance for a swap, okay, so don’t f*ck this up for me,” she barks.

Excerpt from “The Men Are Not Fine in Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf” by Pete Hempstead. Read the full article here.