Dueling spouses are riveting drama

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Special to The Advertiser

•	'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' 2 p.m. Sunday and March 14 Richardson Theatre, Fort Shafter $6 438-4480

The four-character play takes place during a long night of faculty drinking on a small college campus. The characters are two intelligent and articulate couples who skewer each other verbally while testing the limits between reality and illusion.

Vanita Rae Smith directs a cast of veteran actors in a readers' theater format. She compresses the play's three acts to run with one intermission and one short stretch break. Even with cuts to the dialogue and staging, the reading runs nearly three hours, but every minute is saturated with expectation.

Richard Pellett plays George, a mediocre history professor, and Jo Pruden appears as Martha, his shrewish wife and daughter of the school president.

Their marriage is an uneasy armistice between two combatants who know each other's moves

and vulnerabilities. They communicate in a shorthand of clues and key phrases that constitute their rules of engagement. But on this night, they break most of them.

Martha has invited a new couple home from the faculty party. Nick (Russell Motter) is the ambitious new member of the biology department and Honey (Shari Lynn) is his mousey wife.

Nick and Honey get ensnared in George and Martha's cat-and-mouse game. Amidst the drinking and verbal barrage fly a host of lines that, heard once, stay with you always.

"Rubbing alcohol for you, Martha?"

"Sure. Never mix, never worry."

Smith departs from her standard approach of seating actors behind music stands and requiring most of them to read multiple parts.

This cast is gathered around a dining table and read only a single character each.

Pellett and Pruden build the dialogue like crazed carpenters — hammering fiercely one moment, then demolishing with wrecking bars the next.

Much of the dialogue overlaps and intersects, with two speeches occurring simultaneously as the characters parry for control.

Their final confrontation, in which old secrets are revealed and eliminated, is as wrenching and cathartic as an exorcism.

Motter's Nick is slow to warm to this perverse reality, and spends much of the last scenes bitterly commenting on George and Martha's psychological duel. Lynn's Honey is appropriately distracted and self-focused.

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is demanding and engrossing. This reader's theater performance hits all the right notes.