Stage Door Review

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Sunday, January 26, 2025

✭✭

by Edward Albee, directed by Brendan Healy

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

January 23-February 16, 2025

George: “Now, I think we’ve been having a real good evening, all things considered. We sat around, we’ve got to know each other, and we’ve had fun and games”

Canadian Stage’s production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a masterclass in superb acting. Director Brendan Healy understands the play and expertly maintains the play’s inexorable pace and firmly guides the work’s ever-changing moods. There is no doubt that the production would have more impact in a smaller theatre and on a less barn-like set, but the actors generate enough electricity that it does not entirely dissipate in the vast spaces that surround them.

Publicity for the play emphasized that it was to feature two real-life couples playing the work’s two couples. One couple, Martha Burns and Paul Gross, play Martha and George while the other couple, Hailey Gillis and Mac Fyfe, were to play Honey and Nick. As it happened Fyfe was not able to appear on opening night because of medical issues. Canadian Stage found a last minute substitute in Stratford Festival regular Rylan Wilkie. With only five days of rehearsal and carrying book in hand, Wilkie gave such a hugely impressive performance one could easily overlook the book.

The vulgar language and the sexual references that made the play so scandalous when it premiered in 1962 have minimal effect now that one can hear much worse in shows on popular streaming services. What remains is Albee’s complex portrait of a marriage of two damaged people who enjoy humiliating each other and any unfortunate outsiders who happen to enter their world. George and Martha’s hate-hate relationship is very like the relationship of the Captain and Alice in Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (1900). Strindberg gave his couple only one character to play with. Albee gives his two, a couple who have exactly opposite personalities to George and Martha.

The plot is simple. George is an Associate Professor of History in the small (fictional) New England town of New Carthage. He is married to Martha whose father is President of the college. At a faculty mixer at the start of a new term Martha meets a new Professor of Biology and invites him and his wife Honey over for drinks. Although it is already 2am, the couple do arrive and George and Martha proceed to entertain them. They ply the couple with drink, tell nasty anecdotes about each other and quiz them about themselves with more of an aim of ridiculing them than really trying to know them.

A strange detail emerges that a certain subject is taboo, namely that of George and Martha’s son who is supposed to be coming home for his 21st birthday later that day. His existence is a subject that both have vowed never to tell anyone about. Unfortunately, Martha already far gone in drink when Nick and Honey arrive, tells Honey about him. Underlying all the degrading games and George and Martha’s vicious banter is George’s plan to punish Martha for breaking the taboo.

Publicity may have emphasized that George and Martha are played by a real-life couple, but what is far more important is that Paul Gross and Martha Burns give not only their best-ever performances on stage but the best-ever performances I have ever seen of these roles. Albee’s Martha is probably the most complex role for a woman in American drama. Verbal aggression to vulgar wit to self-ridicule to overt seduction to a descent into pain and despair – Burns encompasses all these and molds them into a single complex but comprehensible woman. It is a marvellous achievement. I have always enjoyed Martha Burns’s performances but here she is simply astonishing.

Albee’s George is hardly as showy a role but it requires just as much subtlety. Gross plays George as a wry commentator on Martha and her activities, painting her as some sort of primordial carnivorous animal who survives on liquor and preys on young men. Gross adopts a tone of unperturbed rationality to contrast with Burns’s wild shifts in mood, but Gross shows us soon enough that George’s baseline tone can also take on undertones of pain, menace and even tenderness. These undertones can sometimes even dominate, but Gross demonstrates that George is able, if not always immediately, to restabilize himself.

What Burns and Gross achieve, that most Georges and Marthas do not, is a real rapport. This is crucial in the play since what distinguishes George and Martha as a couple from Nick and Honey is that George and Martha, despite their fighting, share an indissoluble bond whereas Nick and Honey do not. What Burns and Gross communicate so strongly is that George and Martha’s relationship is based on shared pain and sorrow, on a shared knowledge of their inadequacies and failings. Albee gives Martha a key speech about why George is the only man who has ever satisfied her. She says that George is someone “who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; … whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: yes; this will do; who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me and must be punished for it”. What Burns and Gross display so well is the life of two people who are very much like children, who sometimes really get angry and really hurt each other, but who get over it because living with each other is so much better than that thought of living alone.

By contrast, Nick and Honey have been married only two years and have not yet established any sort of gameplaying that unites them. While George and Martha seem to become more themselves the more they drink, liquor causes Nick and Honey to reveal the personalities they have hidden under a façade of bland conventionality. Wilkie shows that Nick becomes increasingly outraged at George and Martha’s behaviour, but he also demonstrates that Nick becomes more aggressive and lustful. Gillis reveals that Honey’s outward reticence conceals a truly crazy, childish side of her personality that Nick is embarrassed to see. Gillis has a perfected a way of delivering Honey’s lines in such an amusingly off-kilter fashion that they earn more laughter than any other Honey I’ve seen.

Given that Healy has assembled and well directed such an excellent cast, it is a pity that they do not have a décor that enhances their performances. Julie Fox has created numerous fine sets in the past, but this time her imagination seems to have faltered. She is confronted with a venue that is too large and a stage that is inordinately large for an auditorium of only 868 seats. The stage opening is 48’ wide and 25’ high. By comparison, the opening of the Avon Theatre at the Stratford Festival is only 33’ wide and 21’ high for an auditorium that seats 1000. Designing a set for the Bluma that represents only one room is always a challenge. The best way to solve the problem is to create a platform with open sides and space on either side. This is what Michael Gianfrancesco did last year to depict the house that Eric inherits in The Inheritance, Part 2.

In this production Fox has made George and Martha’s living room completely fill the stage opening, thus dwarfing the actors. As if this were not enough, she covers the entire stage left wall with mirrors so that the stage looks even bigger. For the play to have maximum impact it must seem to be a large noise in a small space. One reason Mike Nichols’s 1966 film of the play is so successful stems from the claustrophobia he captures inside George and Martha’s home.

Besides this, Fox has included a revolve at the centre of the living room where the main seating is. Healy makes so little use of it, it really should not exist. His worst use is to have the revolve turn during Martha’s long speech In Act 3 describing her beloved son. Nothing, especially not a turning set, should distract us from a speech so central to the play.

Luckily, the performances in this production are so riveting that you can blot out the ridiculously huge playing area and focus on the actors. Their combined effort creates the best-acted production of this masterpiece I have seen in Canada.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Paul Gross as George, Hailey Gillis as Honey, Martha Burns as Martha and Rylan Wilkie as Nick; Martha Burns as Martha and Paul Gross as George; Paul Gross as George and Martha Burns as Martha. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.