As the saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.” Well, in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” it’s really “all fun and games and everyone gets hurt.”
Now at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, this is a draining show, physically and emotionally, for the actors as well as the audience. The onetime Montauker’s 1962 play is long, written in three acts with two 10-minute intermissions, which are needed, as each act runs a little under an hour. Audience members can not only stretch their legs, they can take a break from the emotional turmoil they’re witnessing onstage, which is delightfully uncomfortable.
The play takes place in the early hours of the morning after a faculty party in a New England college town, with two couples meeting up for drinks. Rosemary Cline and Andrew Botsford are Martha and George, with Cameron Eastland and Amanda Griemsmann as a younger couple, Nick and Honey, guests for the evening. Martha is the daughter of the college’s president, and George is a long-term professor there. Nick is the newest faculty member, and he and his wife have recently moved from the Midwest.
The biggest irony of the show is that Martha invited the couple over because her father had told her they should “be nice to them.” But what occurs over their time together is anything but. It’s an evening full of lies, games, and jabs, with two young people caught in the crossfire of a decades-long battle of wits.
Mr. Botsford and Ms. Cline expertly play out this battle. George and Martha are hard characters full of love and bitterness, and the relationship feels lived in and real. As Mr. Eastland keeps up with them, his character is really a prop the two use to hurt each other, while Ms. Griemsmann brings good comic relief when scenes get tense.
This is a play about marriage, its complexities, how two people can simultaneously love and hate each other, the years of resentments boiling over, the shared trauma leading to co-dependent coping mechanisms.
George and Martha like to poke each other until the pokes become knives to the stomach. They also share a special relationship to reality, with illusions built up to shield themselves from it. The hardest hits they land result from breaking part of their shared illusion out of spite.
But even though they continuously prod and try to rile each other up, the twisted love beneath it all reveals itself. In the third act, after all she’s done to torture George, Martha insists to Nick that George is only person who gets her. He is the only one who can keep up in their battle of wits.
The production is directed by George Loizides, produced by Mary Powers, with set and sound design by Meg Sexton, lighting design by Sebastian Paczynski, and costume design by Teresa Lebrun. Gary Hygom is the production stage manager.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” runs until June 8, with performances every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. There is an additional afternoon show on Saturday, June 7, and there will be two cast talkbacks following the evening performances tomorrow and Friday, June 6.
Tickets are $40 at hamptontheatre.org, $36 for senior citizens, $30 for veterans and Native Americans, and $25 for students.
