“Martha’s Revenge”
Parody plays about TV shows are rather common, examples over
Everyone’s
Fine with Virginia Woolf, Kate Scelsa’s helter-skelter deconstruction of
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? at the Abrons Arts Center.the past few years having spoofed
such popular series as “Three’s a Crowd,” “Friends,” and “Golden Girls.” Less often seen are full-out takeoffs on important plays. That, however, is what the respected Off-Broadway experimental theatre company, Elevator Repair Service, is now providing with Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf, Kate Scelsa’s helter-skelter deconstruction of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Abrons Arts Center.
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| Vin Knight, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
I have decidedly mixed feelings, generally unfavorable,
about the effort, some of which is incomprehensible while some is quite funny,
if not as thought-provoking as its creators might have intended.
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| Mike Iveson, Vin Knight, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Written specifically for ERS by one of its longtime members,
EFWVW takes a satirical, feminist
look at Albee’s treatment of the character of Martha in terms of what Scelsa
considers Albee’s unfair treatment of her. Scelsa's views are outlined in a chat (online and, edited, in
the program) with the play’s director, John Collins.
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| Vin Knight, April Matthis, Mike Iveson. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
In the online version, Collins describes Scelsa's response to Albee’s original as “Celebrating it, blowing it up, surgically ripping
it to shreds, and birthing a triumphant new way of seeing those people. . . .
It’s an amazing act of critique, of parody, of destruction, and rebirth, exacted
on this very famous play. And what’s amazing about it is that, in tearing it down
and rebuilding it, it does what the original does even better, even
more.” “Martha’s revenge,” Collins calls it.
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| April Matthis, Mike Iveson, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Like those TV parodies mentioned above, Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf belongs to the genre of “fan fiction,” wherein
someone writes new material, usually unauthorized, about well-known fictional
characters. There’s really no way to appreciate Scelsa’s take on Virginia Woolf without close familiarity
with its plot and characters.
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| Mike Iveson, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Conceived (like the original) in three acts but played as an
intermissionless hour-and-a-half one-act, EFWVW
is about the same famous quartet: George (Vin Knight) and Martha Washington (Annie McNamara), the
bibulous professor and his raucous wife, and Nick (Mike Iveson) and Honey
Sloane (April Matthis), the desperate-for-tenure new professor and his
innocuous wife. (Note the characters’ new last names, Sloane being an allusion
to characters in ERS’s famous 2012 production of Gatz).
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| April Matthis, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Gathered for an evening of drinks, these cartoon characters enact
a fever dream version of Albee’s play, played as steroid-level farce in a cartoon
living room (designed by Louisa Thompson). Pregnancy being a theme of Albee’s
play (Honey's "hysterical pregnancy" and Martha and George’s baby story), it takes on new meanings here, since
both men are depicted as gay (although Nick has had an affair with Martha), but
with Nick talking about mpreg, hoping
he can one day give birth.
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| Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The talk also emphasizes not only fan fiction but slash fiction, which
Scelsa describes as being “where mostly straight women writers live out a
fantasy of male queerness.” Fan fiction, slash fiction, mpreg! Ain’t theatre
educational?
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| Vin Knight, Mike Iveson. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
In her quest to “turn the tables” with her own version of
Martha, Scelsa calls upon a constant stream of playwriting references,
specifically to works whose gay authors depicted and destroyed damaged women
who many see as hidden parts of the dramatists’ own personas. In this view,
Martha is actually Albee’s avatar.
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| Annie McNamara, Vin Knight. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Substantial chunks of exaggeratedly acted dialogue lifted
from Williams’s Blanche and Maggie mingle with allusions (usually comically
distorted) not only to Albee’s play but to numerous other sources, including Annie Hall, “Will and Grace,” the Twilight series, Ibsen, Walt Whitman, Emily
Dickinson, Samuel Beckett, Stephen Sondheim, Alison Bechdel, and so on. Perhaps
for legal reasons, the script even concludes with a list of just where every
arcane and not so arcane reference comes from.
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| Vin Knight, Mike Iveson, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Whatever sociological points Scelsa wants to make are buried
in tons of exaggerated behavior. And if you think the two acts set in George
and Martha’s house are pretty wild, wait until the third when George (like Jerry Springer in the recent "opera" about that TV personality) gets sent
to purgatory. There, a huge robot glides about and George’s escort is neurosis-sucking female vampire
cum Ph.D. candidate who pontificates with lines like this: “I would go so far
as to argue that when men write about the failures of women, they’re writing
about the failure of the vulnerable individual. And when men write about the
failures of men, they’re writing about the failure of society.” How very
un-Albee of her!
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| Vin Knight, Lindsay Hockaday. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
There are indeed some yocks (a Woody Allen bit, especially),
and many visitors continued to chuckle long after my own laugh battery died.
All the actors acquit themselves well at this sort of pseudo-academic literary
silliness, and, if you’re of a particular bent, you might even agree that Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf even
if you’re still afraid of Edward Albee.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St., NYC
Through June 30