Till Death Do Us Part

By T.E.K.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? by Edward Albee

The plays that belong in the durable realm of dramatic art seem to predate their creation. They exercise a strange primordial authority and inevitability. Virginia Woolf is just that sort of invincible work.

Albee understood "the territorial imperative" before the term was invented. The marriage of George (Ben Gazzara) and Martha (Colleen Dewhurst) is a strip of defoliated jungle from which neither intends to retreat. They are locked in mortal combat and, in an ironic echo of the marital oath, only death will be able to part them.

The young couple, Nick (Richard Kelton) and Honey (Maureen Anderman), who join them for a savage 2 a.m.-to-5 a.m. session of show-and-tell are simply deployed by George and Martha as fodder for their internecine warfare. The words are tracer bullets and the drinks are hemlock, but the blood lust has an almost tonic ebullience.

No Abmaphid. The abundance of humor provides constant comic relief. It has an enormously supple range, by turns sophisticated, acid, intellectual, putdown, cynical, broad, black and even sick. The two leads are superb. Dewhurst does not need to bray "I am the Earth Mother." We know it on sight. We sense that a Samson might have won her respect but never an "Abmaphid ... A.B. ... M.A. ... Ph.D." As "the bog in the history department," Gazzara's professorial George is detached but not desiccated. His wry grin portends revenge. He is a much trodden worm with a cobra's fangs. The less thankful roles of the subsidiary couple are less thankfully played. The giggly Anderman seems to have inhaled laughing gas rather than downed tumblers of brandy, and Kelton's Nick is docile enough to have made Martha's bed but never Martha.

Nonetheless, this revival is triumphant. In the theater there are, ultimately, two kinds of drama, the quick and the dead. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? belongs articulately and terrifyingly among the quick.

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