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« Change is coming in the Loop: Hello 'Wicked,' farewell and thanks to 'Billy Elliot the Musical' |Main| 'A Christmas Carol' at the Goodman: Sentimental Scrooge needs a heartlessness transplant »November 26, 2010Amy Morton and Tracy Letts, ready to tear it up in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'Share|
Actor Amy Morton, left, and actor and playwright Tracy Letts in a rehearsal space for Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They will appear together in the upcoming "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)
When Tracy Letts and Amy Morton ignite George and Martha's Fun and Games in “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” it will mark the first time that a play by Edward Albee has ever appeared on the stage of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
“Not for lack of trying. Not for lack of trying,” said Martha Lavey, the company's artistic director, in a telephone interview. “We approached Mr. Albee about this play many times. Believe me, a lot of our ensemble members were very interested in doing this play.”
“I think,” said Letts in a separate interview outside the rehearsal room where “Woolf” was being wrought, “that Mr. Albee was probably aware of Steppenwolf in its early days, with its reputation as a wild, rock ‘n' roll kind of theater and thought, ‘Well, that's great, but not with one of my plays.'”
“I can only hold a grudge,” said Albee, in the same rehearsal room a day later, “for no more than 25 years.”
When the famously precise and irascible Albee — who insists on casting approval for all major productions of his plays and has never been shy about withholding permissions — is not only flying in from New York to attend rehearsals but cracking jokes about his own stubbornness, it's a pretty good bet that any and all hatchets have been buried. Previews for the Steppenwolf “Virginia Woolf” start Thursday; the show opens Dec. 12.
In an interview, Albee made passing reference to “some kind of problem of some sort” and “Steppenwolf once wanting to do something naughty with one of the plays,” but he mostly brushed off that line of questioning. Attending the end of the third week of “Woolf” rehearsal, he professed himself “very pleased with the quality of the work I've seen.”
“These are first-rate actors,” Albee said of Letts and Morton, whose complex professional and personal relationship goes back roughly the same number of years that George and Martha have been married. “And, of course, I think the play is pretty good.”
The 1962 drama, of course, is the much-studied and revered story of a vituperative, middle-aged academic couple — bored with their mundane, impotent New England lives, yet endlessly stimulated by their fantastically fertile marriage — whose drunken, late-night domestic antics ensnare Nick (played at Steppenwolf by Madison Dirks), a younger and insufficiently wary fellow faculty member, and Honey (Carrie Coon), his somewhat hysterical wife. Truths are told. Eventually. At heavy cost to all involved.
There would seem to be several causes for the great Albee-Steppenwolf thaw of 2010 — not the least of which was Steppenwolf's decision to hire Pam MacKinnon, one of Albee's preferred directors of his work and a woman with whom the playwright “has a shorthand” — but the melt is certainly welcome to the Chicago theater company, which has been on a major role ever since the summer of 2008, when Letts' “August: Osage County” first opened in Chicago and took most of the English-speaking world by storm.
Albee would later see that play — which he described last weekend as a “beautifully written, gold-solid, naturalistic play” — on Broadway. And when Letts received an award (one of many the Pulitzer Prize-winning play received) from the New York Drama Critics Circle, he was moved to see that Albee was up on stage doing the introduction.
“I told a story at the time,” Letts recalled of that event in May 2008, “about my being a little kid at home in Oklahoma with my father's copy of ‘Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf' and playing George. I was never a Nick.” Clearly, the mutually admiring relationship between Letts and Albee was a further help.
And, of course, Albee had seen the on-stage art of Morton, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her work in “August.”
Morton is, in many ways, counter-intuitive casting for Martha, a role inextricably associated in the minds of many with the extravagant, Oscar-wining actress Elizabeth Taylor, who appeared in the 1966 movie version alongside Richard Burton. And, indeed, when “Virginia Woolf” was last seen on Broadway, it starred Kathleen Turner, another actress associated with extravagant theatricality.
Morton, by contrast, is known primarily for the theatrical expression of no-nonsense, unadorned, Chicago-style truth.
Many of the actresses who have played this role seem at ease with cocktail-party gossip. Morton famously abhors idle chit-chat.
“Martha is a performance-centered role, for sure,” MacKinnon said. “But within that is an ugly core that we need to know she is covering up. Layering layer upon layer of artifice is outside Amy's — dare I say it? — comfort zone. But with Amy, the normally difficult stuff — and Martha is a character who is truly inconsolable — is there right from the get-go. That is what is so exciting for me as a director.”
“She is capable of bravura and duplicity and yet I believe every word she is saying,” Albee says of Morton. “And here you don't have a situation, which I have had a number of times with this particular play, where the actress playing Martha thinks the play is all about her.”
Lavey — the other Martha in Morton's current orbit — says that Martha is the role that Morton identified as the role she most wanted for her post-“August” return to the stage, and that had earned the right to call for such an opportunity.
“I do not know of an actress,” Morton noted, “who has not at least fantasized of playing Martha.” Indeed, Morton had an up-close view of her fantasy when she directed a production of “Virginia Woolf” at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2004. The late Margo Skinner played Martha.
Letts played George.
He may have done the role twice, but he's also an unconventional choice. A big man with a commanding and frequently relentless on-stage presence, Letts is a seemingly different type from a very precise and clipped actor such as Bill Irwin (who played opposite Turner in Anthony Page's 2005 Broadway revival). George's power-games often play out as the passive-aggressive gamble of a man familiar with impotence. Letts — who invariably professes a lack of comfort with the social requirements of the business in which he now occupies quite a powerful position — suggests a rather different energy.
“Ah yes, Tracy plays a deceiving game,” says MacKinnon. “He radiates a certain verbal acuity. And if Martha is the bravura performer, George is the wit in the house. But you know, I cast this young Chicago actor as Nick. He's not any bigger than Tracy. But he's 20 years younger. He could probably take him. Youth has that power.”
“There is something about George's insecurities, his verbosity, his sense of humor,” Letts says, wryly, “that makes a certain kind of sense to me.”
Morton and Letts, who are now very much the age of Albee's two most famous characters, go back a long way together. Indeed, at least some of Morton's profound acting success in “August” was a consequence of being handed a role that was written especially for her. They have an intimacy, they clearly share a sardonic sense of humor, and they often seem to know what the other is about to say and, more tellingly, when the other needs help.
With a play such as this — Morton says it feels very much “like an improv with text” as distinct from a typical drama where an actor can define clear, moment-by-moment objectives — such a supportive partnership is a major asset.
But even from the outside, it's clear that the Letts-and-Morton thing is rather more complex than mere long-term friendship.
In “August,” Morton was speaking Letts' lines. In “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” she will be playing in, and to, his face. It is Albee, finally. And it is also a further chapter.
“There is always,” says MacKinnon, “this weird stuff flowing between them at all times. It is not an invention.”
Posted at 12:10:00 AMin "August: Osage County", Steppenwolf Theatre CompanyCommentsPerhaps you should have mentioned that Morton and Letts have appeared together at Steppenwolf before, notably in "Betrayal" in 2007.
Posted by:ALS |November 26, 2010 at 08:49 AMBetter to leave "Betrayal" unmentioned. I thought that was a particularly unfortunate role for Amy Morton.
Looking forward to the Albee, however.
Posted by:chaucerquest |November 29, 2010 at 05:32 AMVerify your CommentPreviewing your CommentPosted by: |This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.
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