In a first-time collaboration, Bozeman Actors Theatre and the MSU Department of English will present a staged reading of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Friday and Saturday, November 4th & 5th, at MSU’s Black Box Theatre. The play’s author, Edward Albee, died in September at the age of 88 following a celebrated and influential career in modern American drama. That makes Albee’s best-known play a timely offering for local audiences, said Cara Wilder, a member of the artistic company and board of directors for Bozeman Actors Theatre. The play also figures prominently in a modern drama class taught this fall at Montana State University by Dr. Gretchen Minton, professor of English. Wilder and Minton decided that a staged reading at MSU would help students and the general public experience the power of Albee’s words more than 50 years after the play’s Broadway premiere. “This play is always best when seen performed up close, where you can feel the raw emotions of the four characters,” Wilder said. “It’s a tense battle of wills that should generate a lot of discussion among our audiences.” Over the course of the play’s three acts, the marriage of a middle-aged couple, Martha and George, disintegrates in front of their late-night guests, Nick and Honey, a young couple they have met earlier in the evening at a college faculty party. Each couple faces painful truths, and no one emerges unscathed, Wilder said. In the Bozeman Actors Theatre production, Wilder and Gordon Carpenter will read the roles of Martha and George, while Steven Harris-Weiel and Susan Miller will play their counterparts. Dee Dee Van Zyl directs. Although the play is more than a half-century old, the poignancy of its story is as fresh as ever, said Minton, whose course introduces students to a range of plays that examine the damaged family, addiction, race and gender, the ethics of science, shattered love, and more. “
As a genre that deals in illusion, drama does a better job than anything else of holding the mirror up to our own illusions, which we continually construct in order to survive,” Minton said. “Albee was one of the most powerful voices of 20th-century drama, and like many others of this period, he sought to expose the dangerous fictions that make up the fabric of the American Dream.” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” won the Tony Award in 1963 for Best Play and has been revived on Broadway three times, most recently in 2012 with Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha. The story may be best remembered from the 1966 film adaptation starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the title roles. Both were nominated for Oscars that year, but Taylor won for Best Actress. Wilder notes that the play also was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But the award’s advisory board overruled the jury—citing objections to the play’s profanity and sexual themes, both tame by today’s standards—and chose not to issue an award that year. Some of the jurors resigned in protest. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” begins at 7pm on November 4th and 5th at MSU’s Black Box Theatre, located on the corner of 11th Ave. and Grant St. Parking is free in the MSU lots adjacent to the theater.
Admission is free for students, with a $10 suggested donation at the door for all others. Seating is not reserved. The play runs approximately three hours with an intermission and an optional discussion afterward. Please call Bozeman Actors Theatre at (406) 580-0374 for more information. •
