Sitting in the third row seared pretty deeply onto my retina the image of Kathleen Turner shoving her tongue out of her mouth repeatedly like a dog tasting something bitter. They may find the image there, like ghost text on one of those old amber CRTs from before there were flying toasters, when I die.
This is not intended to mock Turner for her fierce, loud, grinding portrayal of the unsympathetic Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" that Carol and I caught in Boston last week. It's a mean part, narrow in its expressions, which run the gamut from bullying to hateful with not enough distance in between. Turner's bit with her tongue, repeated periodically, is her sort of signature on the role. This production's noisiest predecessor is a movie whose viewership was sufficiently great to generate a memorable wave in the play's brief history, and Turner's thankless task is to follow in Elizabeth Taylor's choppy wake. Taylor did OK with it, and Turner did better than OK the night we saw her, but the part is only half a role. The full role is that of George and Martha together, a biliously and incisively unhappy couple whose sparring is shocking in its fulsome cruelty and frequent wit. George in this production is played by Bill Irwin, a clown and dancer and undersung actor who here excelled in his half of the thankless chore of bringing George and Martha to life.
I write this knowing that search engines will bring the curious New York theatregoer (or not) who wants to know whether the production is worth its hefty pricetag. The answer is that the ticket is absolutely worth it. Turner is her own Martha, a brassy, tasteless failure. Irwin, perhaps best unknown as Sesame Street's Mister Noodle (not Mister Noodle's brother, the sadly late Mister Noodle), is -- as Carol noted -- brilliantly pent in this role, a fluid dancer forbidden his grace, a sweet comedian forbidden to charm. The supporting actors support fine, but steal few bits of scenes. Albee's script is what it has always been, devastating in its frank revelation of hatred and grudging tenderness. (I saw it first in high school, the Burton-Taylor thing, and passed years have polished its edge so that I barely feel the slice now compared to my horror then.)
My mother told me when i was little that if I didn't care for the end of a book I could imagine as many chapters as I wanted to follow it, to repair sad endings or build new happier ones. I've spent more than a little imagined time with George and Martha when they wake up the next afternoon, hungover and pitiful. I hope I've been right. I'd hate the sequel simply to be the play's revival.
