On Friday night I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Ahmanson Theatre with a couple of playwright friends. I’ve often heard this play referred to as a “descent into Hell” — and that pretty much sums up my feelings about this production, which over the course of three acts slid from mediocrity into the pit.

Mind you, I love this play. The script remains an inspiration. But I didn’t love much of what I saw in the production.

What’s wrong with it? Well, as Terence noted drily when George (Bill Irwin) is trying to strangle his wife (Kathleen Turner) in the second act, “I don’t think this violence should be comic.” Indeed not. Act Two is called, by the playwright, “Walpurgisnacht,” which conjures a night of revels, debauchery, decadence, and abandon — a combination of a pagan rite and an unfortunate run-in with the devil (as in Faust). Here what we had was a performance that alternated between strangely muted and bizarrely affected. The last time I saw such physical action so badly executed was 13 years ago when it took an elderly Jason Robards about nine months of stage time to get ready to take a fall that we all saw coming. Similarly, when George is pulled away and knocked over by his younger rival, the fall taken by Irwin, an aging clown I greatly admire, was purely comedic. Rather than a tragic look into the ugly compromises infecting a long-term marriage, what we got was a comic look of judgment on people who ought to no better — something straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Baby Party.”

At the curtain call, after she has slipped from the Ottoman in a patently false manner in the end of Act Three, Kathleen Turner wiped away tears as though overcome by the loss of her phantasmagoric child. I don’t know what she found so moving, and can only wish I had shared in some of it.

Why has this all gone so wrong? How can the actress playing Honey be this bad? (I can only hope that drinking alcohol does indeed contribute to memory loss, because I need to do something to scrub her screeching voice from my brain.) Michael’s theory was that the actors have been doing this show too long. I tried to be generous and chalk it up to a bad — very bad — evening. The reviews on the L.A. production have been mixed, and the word-of-mouth from everyone I know who has seen it has been generally negative. I wish I could disagree. But surely no one could imagine it would be this bad, so utterly devoid of shock and upset, so completely off-track as the play goes on and the jokes die away.

Who’s afraid of Virgina Woolf? On Friday night, absolutely no one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under On seeing, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.