The Play About the Everycouple: 'Virginia Woolf' on Broadway

(R) Say what you will about the nightly boxing match currently on display at the Longacre Theater, where Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened tonight--- but nobody expected it to be a fair fight.

After all, Kathleen Turner, the crunchy-voiced movie star cum Broadway headliner, has signed on to play Martha, Edward Albee's outlandishly vulgar heroine shaped by Uta Hagen and immortalized by Elizabeth Taylor. Her adversary? A mild-mannered and likeable former mime named Bill. (Irwin, that is.) Nobody who heard about the casting--- least of all those of us who didn't mutter "who?" at Irwin's name--- could help but sympathize with the guy. You may not love Turner, but she certainly seems born to pierce somebody's skull, most likely with the shingles of her deeply cadenced voice.

Call it the Tortoise-Hare phenomenon. Irwin has brought an blazingly focused energy to the production that Turner never matches. His George sneers and delights at all the right moments, but even when feeling threatened, he never loses his tight grip on the proceedings. For all the talk of George's emasculation, the text has always suggested a divine power for him. But Turner never truly makes a grab for it; her Martha gave up years ago, and now thrives on the ocassional jab or one-uppance. It's a bold choice, but not a dramatically compelling one, and it ultimately renders the play's three-plus hours only intermittently involving.

It doesn't help matters that its director, Anthony Page, appears to value efficiency over storytelling. I saw the show in late previews, yet it often felt like a cue-to-cue rehearsal, with a group of weary-eyed but determined professionals stumbling about in the ever-diminishing hopes of getting into bed close to midnight. This affliction touches even Irwin--- at times, you can sense him morphing into automatic pilot, particularly in his longer streches alone with Turner. It's never less than servicable, and it's peppered with several moments of coherence, but the only true revelation here is Mireille Enos, who brings an astonishingly frail sensibility to the role of the younger man's wife.

At the core of all this static, though, is Albee's now classic play, which holds up far better than should be expected under the circumstances. We still cry tears of sorrow and compassion when this American Everycouple's illusions shatter and we finally hear the answer to the play's title question. It is a marvelous tribute to Albee that even this routine production can't obscure the devastating impact of his words. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? belongs, without a doubt, on the pint-sized list of American artistic miracles; listen, through its haunted characters, to a solemn warning for a nation on the brink of losing its innocence once again.