Arts & Culture

What: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Where: Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E.
When: Now, until Sun., Feb. 16
Highlight: Expansive set creates a dollhouse effect for this explosive four-hander
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Albee’s classic is still dizzying and hilarious.

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN to an awkward dinner party? I guarantee you, it doesn’t hold a candle to the dizzying all-nighter pulled in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Following a staff party at a university, Martha (Martha Burns), the daughter of the university’s president, and George (Paul Gross), a history professor, stumble into their home — teasing and prodding one another. Though it’s 2 am, Martha reveals that a young couple they’ve just met at the party, Nick (Rylan Wilkie) and Honey (Hailey Gillis), are going to join them for a nightcap. Thus begins the sexually charged battle between Martha and George as they go head to head in a series of competitions (that may as well be named “Who can make our house guests more uncomfortable?”).

Director Brendan Healy’s three-hour production takes this intimate four-hander and places it on an expansive stage. As seen in his production of The Inheritance, Healy is a master of fusing and defusing emotional tension on a big stage, and he continues to display this here. Set Designer Julie Fox does a stellar job of creating a homey but off-kilter living room for Martha and George: one of the walls is a full-length floor-to-ceiling mirror, slightly distorting their every move. The matching couch and love set are placed on a rotating stage that strategically and ominously turns at high-intensity moments. The set creates a dollhouse effect for these characters, making them feel small and inconsequential against the backdrop: something that works in this production’s favour balancing out big performances as tensions rise higher and higher between the characters.

What’s unique about this Toronto production? Director Healy cast the leading couples with real-life married couples … or, well, that was the intention. Burns and Gross could be dubbed a power couple of Canadian Theatre, racking up unending credits and awards. To no one’s surprise, they make a compelling couple on stage. Hailey Gillis and Mac Fyfe, another Canadian theatre couple, were cast as Honey and Nick, but due to a medical issue, Rylan Wilkie swooped in as Nick.

Wilkie is on book for opening night (as he joined the cast five days ago), but honestly, you can barely even tell. He is quite convincing as Nick, a lukewarm biology professor at the university seems to be just “fine” in his life. He has stellar chemistry with Martha — or should I say “biology”? Burns’s Martha is deliciously brash, energized and powerful. Gross’s George, an expert of the non-sequitur, is convincing as a wordsmith trying to poke holes in all of his house guests. Gillis plays an adorable Honey who delightfully flails around, unbeknownst to the game being played around her. All of the actors involved in this deserve an unequivocal round of applause for delivering Albee’s thick text; this classic seems to require more breath support than Shakespeare.

Lighting by Kimberly Purtell is simple but clear, using the oppositions of blues and yellows. There are four warm lamps on stage (and their reflections in the mirror) that permeate the overwhelming blueness of the room. Light also pours in from other rooms, such as the landing from upstairs and the kitchen: little bits of brightness that seep into Martha and George’s gloomy reality.

Albee’s style is unmistakable, there is a beautiful and confusing rhythm to his lines. Everything is dry humour, everything is a riddle. This 1962 text still resonates in its confusing playfulness. CanStage’s theatre roared with laughter, surely also in part due to the clever direction and physically lively performances.

At three hours, this production is exhausting … in a good way, thankfully. It’s a challenge for the audience to stay alert and pay attention to Albee’s thick words and Healy’s detailed direction. It’s a test: Don’t miss a single second if you want to uncover the truth. By the end of these three hours, you’ll feel like you’ve been up all night alongside the dinner guests in a dizzy yet invigorating disarray, having witnessed these strangers’ lives piece together and break apart.