Globe debuts Classics Up Close series with 'Virginia Woolf'


In the 1966 film version of Edward Albee's searing drama "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" director Mike Nichols got up close and personal with his married co-stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, often bringing the camera within inches of their sometimes snarling teeth.

Old Globe audiences won't get quite as close to Albee's unhappily married George and Martha, but they'll see the play in a more intimate setting than usual with the debut of the Globe's Classics Up Close series this week.

Created by the Globe's resident artistic director Jerry Patch, Classics Up Close will present classic American plays in the Globe's Cassius Carter Centre Stage, a 225-seat theater-in-the-round.

"So many of the great American plays were written for small spaces, but when you see them today, they're always done in huge theaters," Patch said. "These great plays by Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams lend themselves to a smaller space, and through this dramatic compression, the audience rediscovers why they're great plays."

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," which premiered on Broadway in 1962, examines and exposes the farce and fragility of the American family. George, a mediocre, middle-aged history professor at a New England college, and his lascivious lush of a wife, Martha, invite the new, young biology professor, Nick, and his frigid, simple-minded wife, Honey, over for a late-night drink. Unfolding in near-real time, the foursome drink, fight, laugh, dance, reveal secrets and exorcise demons from their past before the dawn brings redemption and a fragile healing.

Although Albee came from a dysfunctional family, "Virginia Woolf" wasn't specifically autobiographical. By naming his lead characters George and Martha (as in the Washingtons), he was poking a hole in the overinflated myth of American family life.

"Remember, this came out right after the 1950s; the 'Ozzie and Harriet,' 'Father Knows Best' period," said Richard Seer, who is directing the Globe production. "There was at that time the idea of the perfect family, when people only talked nicely to each other. He chose academics as his main characters because they were considered the epitome of civilized culture in society. And yet, here are the people who should be the most civil with each other and they're engaged in verbal combat."

Seer, who has run the Globe's master's acting program at the University of San Diego since 1993, said staging "Virginia Woolf" is a huge challenge.

"This one is a tough one," said Seer, who won a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award in 2003 for his direction of the Globe's "Blue/Orange." "It's a long play and it's got a lot of plateaus. It's like a roller-coaster ride."

Two other big challenges are keeping the actors moving so the audience can see them from all sides (fortunately, George and Martha get up to mix a lot of drinks), and controlling the emotions onstage so that the audience doesn't feel like they're in the middle of a long shouting match.

"I don't think audiences will feel that way. They didn't with 'Blue/Orange,' and that was just one big argument," Seer said. "We try to hold off on (the shouting) as long as possible. The first act is very funny. It's mean funny …. very urbane funny, but it's nonetheless very funny. It doesn't really get nasty until the end of the first act. As the evening proceeds, they proceed into darker places as it goes along and becomes more bitter."


