Liberals Virginia Woolf

At the Charles Playhouse, through February 28

EDWARD ALBEE knows who the most destructive people are: they are the bright ones, the ones who are intelligent enough to know how to probe at each other's lives, uncover weakness, and carefully irritate sensitive spots and tear open old wounds. Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf. Albee's play about a perceptive but weak history professor and his dominant, contemptuous wife, pits two destructive people against each other, and against their two unprepared and very vulnerable guests. The actors of the Atma Theater Company's current production, now playing at the Charles Playhouse, make it a very interesting evening indeed.

Virginia Woolf is a study in gamesmanship, gamesmanship that comes more and more into the open as the evening gets later and the characters drunker. A post faculty-party get-together reaches the point where pretenses and defenses have completely fallen before a siege of garbled speech and very clearly pointed conversation. The games are played for more than prestige-points; the stakes rise until two players are at each other's throats and the two others are very nearly at the point of psychological defeat.

Albee is a master of booze-prose; he knows how to create, and make good use of, the changing effects of a long, group drunk. Drunkenness is a dimension of the play, one that changes with time, allows constant development of the characters and permits repetition and refinement of the themes. Frank McCarthy and Cathie Robinson as the middle-aged history professor George and his bitch wife Martha, and Al Ronzio and Lori Heineman as their young faculty-party acquaintances, Nick and Honey, work well under the requirements of this changing dimension. Much of the success of the Atma production of Virginia Woolf depends on the four actors' ability to alter their speech, motions, and emotions in the constantly changing context of their characters' drunkenness, and on the ability of their director, Sam Shamshack, to guide them in doing this.

The role of George is the key characterization in Virginia Woolf, and McCarthy's George is, very fortunately, far and away the best performance of the production. Frank McCarthy knows how to use cigarettes and his double chin to dramatic advantage; he creates an aging man convincingly, a man who is as much the victim of his own realization of his failings as he is the victim of his wife's revilement of them. George is un-ambitious, a tenured associate professor in the history department, a tethered husband and impotent functionary of the college; Martha, the college president's daughter, torments him with gibes at his lack of ability to rise through the academic ranks, reminding him that he was once, but is no longer, being groomed to become the next president of the college. McCarthy's George alternately bends to Martha's punishment and rebels against her seemingly superior strength of will. Eventually, with an academic's rationality, having battled point by point against Martha and against his guests for more than three hours, he brings them, and himself, to the realization of their most fundamental fears. McCarthy paces the play, and keeps, by his earnest counterpoint, Miss Robinson's extravagantly played role of the braying Martha from becoming too much of a caricature of a faculty-wife floozy.

Watching actors coping with the requirements of Albee's script is alone almost enough to recommend any production of Virginia Woolf. But watching the Atma Theater Company's skill in meeting the requirements of the play is an intense emotional experience, a real pleasure. George and Martha draw their casual acquaintances into attacks and confessions that bring Nick and Honey to quite real psychological bondage to the older couple, and that expose to both couples and to the audience, the real horrors of their childless marriage. Honey is a nervous dependent type, played a little affectedly by Miss Heineman; the process of subjugation has to work hardest on the strong, young-and-ambitious biology professor, Nick, Al Ronzio's handling of the problem of this difficult subjugation is confident, if at times momentarily ambiguous, and ultimately satisfying. As his position changes in the space of a few hours from that of a polite and disengaged faculty whiz-kid to George's known cuckolder and Martha's "houseboy," he maintains a consistency of character within which this change can believably take place.

It's hard to understand why both the Atma Theater Company and the Charles Playhouse are facing the possibility of having to close permanently for lack of funds. Good resident theater is not easy to support, but with seats available for this production that cost less than the price of a cheap, bad movie (let alone a good one) at a commercial theater, and with a company that can create the intensity and excitement that separate good theater from bad having to play to quarter capacity audiences and less, it is painfully clear that too many people are missing what they could easily be enjoying. With a new director in the wings for the presently closed Charles Playhouse, the prospects are good for provocative theater next season. But with the Atma Company's Virginia Woolf playing now, there's no need to wait until next season, and very good reason to get to the Charles soon.