Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - The Fulton

When I saw Lancaster City's Fulton Theatre was going to be performing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I knew I couldn't miss the chance to see a professional local production of one of the great plays of all time. I was right.

Having seen the movie a couple years before, I knew the big twist going in, which colored how I saw the play...mostly for good, I believe, as I understood just a bit more how little words can be taken at face value in the show.

Stepping onto the gorgeous wood-paneled set, suggesting something almost north of upper-middle-class, Spencer Davis Milford and Bailey Blaise, as the young married couple Nick and Honey, have apparently stepped straight out of the 60s; Milford has the face of a man not from our time. Blaise has the least to do of the cast, but she's note-perfect in a role that one fears a lesser actor would encourage the audience to laugh at instead of cry for. Milford gives a subtle performance as Nick, who, despite a few moments of drunken vulnerability, is hampered by a sense of irony and superiority.

Kim Carson as Martha looks a tad too young for the role, but no great matter: submerged into the New England vocal affectation and silky wig, she is the one who really brought tears to my eyes as she gradually uncovers the self-loathing and longing beneath Martha's brash exterior.

But ultimately (though Carson gives him a run for his money), it's Jeffrey Coon's show. As George, Coon operates on a wavelength less focused than his costars: Martha and Nick and Honey, with their costumes and hair and accents, are first and foremost characters, products of 1961; their actors are expert musicians in the score written by Albee, following the ebb and flow of timing and emotion. But Coon has the luxury of letting Albee's words inhabit him, blow through him like a hurricane, becoming a hurricane.

I won't spoil the big twist the play is associated with. But for me, the show has a subtler twist: from the first minute of the play, George and Martha are at each other's throats. You feel sorry that they're stuck with each other. But, particularly in Martha's stand-out monologue late in the show, and through to the end, you come to realize that not only is George and Martha's marriage unhealthier than you could have dreamed, they "get" each other on a level no one else can; their marriage survives not in spite of the bickering and fighting, but because they've built their own world together.

There's a ray of hope at the end. George and Martha reach a breaking point; they will go forward facing life as it is. (The last act of the play, in the original script, is titled "Exorcism.") As for Nick and Honey? I'm less sure. Certainly they leave less idealistic than they came. Sometimes that's a good thing.