Play who is afraid of virginia woolf

After they leave a faculty party, Martha informs her professor husband, George, that she's invited the newest faculty member and his young wife over for a nightcap. The greatest challenge within the next three hours is for the director and actors, who must make sense of this dense and at times heavy-handed play, but it's clear Monte and the four-person ensemble have spent countless hours crafting the show. In the role of history professor George, Kevin Sweeney leads the cast, rarely leaving the stage at all.

He leverages a hoarse stage voice to great effect, swelling to a full-on bray at several points. It's the voice of a character lugging a lifetime of baggage. As his desperate, older wife and daughter of the college's president Martha, Dawn Sargent masterfully executes a character who's both heartbreaking and exasperating to watch.

Rounding out the cast are Kiefer Schenk Nick and Sarah Kingsley Honey , who play the newest all-star faculty member and his naive, waifish wife.

At first blush, Schenk and Kingsley seem to portray two-dimensional characters, but the nuance of each actor grows as the play progresses, and these younger ensemble members prove an impressive match for their middle-aged counterparts.

Infidelity, profanity, alcoholism, marital discord: Everything hidden from the bridge and rotary clubs of the day is dragged out and strung from the rafters. Directed by Catherine Fitzgerald, this dystopian western follows two sisters, the last inhabitants of a deserted industrial town, and exposes the way we relate to the land and one another.

View More Subscriptions. This searing one-woman show, starring Justine Clarke, is a high-wire act balancing comedy and drama from the mind of Dennis Kelly, an edge-of-your-seat play that will leave you breathless. Girl From The North Country. Straight from Broadway and the West End, this critically-acclaimed new production takes the legendary songs of Bob Dylan and reimagines them as the profoundly beautiful anthems of a plaintive America.

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More info. But the play, I am convinced, is as much about the state of the Union as about marriage. It is also significant that he wrote the play in the early s when America was slowly emerging from the narcoleptic Eisenhower years and when a fragile Cold War peace depended on the balance of terror.

George and Martha, whose marathon battles we watch with appalled fascination, derive their names from the Washingtons. They live in a college at New Carthage which evokes a classically ruined civilisation.

Richard Burton George as George. George Segal Nick as Nick. Sandy Dennis Honey as Honey. Mike Nichols. Ernest Lehman screenplay Edward Albee play uncredited. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. George Richard Burton and Martha Dame Elizabeth Taylor are a middle-aged married couple, whose charged relationship is defined by vitriolic verbal battles, which underlies what seems like an emotional dependence upon each other.

This verbal abuse is fueled by an excessive consumption of alcohol. George being an associate history professor in a New Carthage university where Martha's father is the President adds an extra dimension to their relationship. Late one Saturday evening after a faculty mixer, Martha invites Nick George Segal and Honey Sandy Dennis , an ambitious young biology professor new to the university and his mousy wife, over for a nightcap. As the evening progresses, Nick and Honey, plied with more alcohol, get caught up in George and Martha's games of needing to hurt each other and everyone around them.

The ultimate abuse comes in the form of talk of George and Martha's unseen sixteen-year-old son, whose birthday is the following day. It can now be said: 1. Apart from its widespread critical acclaim, it has provoked more discussion, interest and excitement than any other picture in memory. People want to see it - in unprecedented numbers. In its first engagements it has shattered every record in the history of all theatres involved.