steve's notebook

(Dec. 13, 2010)

It’s exciting to have your expectations thrown out the window.

I got a little worried as we started into the Steppenwolf’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Saturday night.   It’s a piece I’ve spent enough time with—the text and productions and recordings—that I’ve developed a mental ur-production against which I can’t help but compare any other.  Do we agree who these people are, how they relate, what the piece is all about?  Usually this is a road to dissatisfaction.  It’s a problem.

Very quickly, it was very apparent Tracy Letts and Amy Morton were not my George and Martha.  Which, damn, because I really wanted to like this show.  I did.  I started into that mental routine: Does this make sense?  Is this coming from the text?  And, yes? Yes!  It did!  It was!

I’ve come to appreciate George and Martha’s fight throughout the night as a sort of routine they act out.  The well-worn, familiar games of two intelligent people who need to amuse themselves somehow.  They really are fighting, of course, but they know these steps, for the most part, know their expected parts.   They’re playing tennis.  Using the guests as their balls.  Martha takes a dig at George.  George hits back.  They know what to expect.  The guests grow grossly uncomfortable.  And the old folks like that.  Games. Sick games that let them vent their frustrations in the weird cushioning of familiarity. This is largely informed by the third act: the ease with which they pick up their “lines” in the houseboy game, Martha’s indication that George’s back is nowhere near broken. Dueling for show: their public games.

But they have private ones, too, which serve a different end.  The visible failures can be bandied about; George’s lack of advancement, Martha’s dipsomania – anyone can see those; those are fair game.  The private games are about the darker places.  Two smart, lonely people, unable to have a child invent one, a shared necessary lie.  They both know its’ a fiction, know that there is no physical child, but filling the emptiness demand they contradictorily believe in this shared fiction.  They’ve spent twenty years telling stories about the child, sometimes using him as a weapon against one another, knowing that there is no child, but making him central to their relationship.  When Martha mentions him, that’s the real betrayal.  The would-be infidelities are nothing next to this.  The dirt of the battles is nothing.  But this is exposing the real guts.  It’s the line that once crossed gives George no choice but to end this game.  Even if it was a slip.  If this is how the child will be treated, their relationship must let go of its necessity to move on.

SteppenWoolf wasn’t this at all.

The direction’s greatest strength was a constant awareness of the power relations among everyone on the stage.  Almost from their first moments, George and Martha at odds.  Martha’s “Don’t you know anything” laced with the first drop of bitterness that would grow into the second act.  George significantly put off by the surprise news of guests.

The relation to the guests was perhaps the production’s most unexpectedly gratifying insight.  George and Nick’s conversations during the first two acts are hostile.  Here, that hostility clearly grew out of not just the conflict between their respective fields of letters and sciences, but as part of a larger systematic conflict: Nick’s wave of the future threatening to do away with George specifically.  This is still familiar territory.  Letts took it the extra mile.  His professorial manner was perfection and when facing Nick, he employed it to the hilt.  His provocations and taunts were born not just of goading the guest, but of a need to one-up him, demonstrate his continued professorial dominance, put the young competition in its place.

If Letts was the hyper-intellectual fighter, Any Morton’s Martha was the wild, emotional, instinctual animal.  Her plan of attack was never thought beyond its next move, going after whatever seemed her victim’s easiest vein.  These were not shared, understood games.  Martha tells George, “You make me puke;” later we’ll realize she means it.  Here the cue is taken from the second act, the private moment when Martha admits to George that she’s snapped and is done trying to make it work.  They’re properly at war.

Nick and Honey become weapons.  Martha knows Nick makes George nervous, so she dives into George’s failings to tear him down.  Nick wants to win, too, and enjoy the chance he’s provided.  George tries to strike back, but up through most of the second act, he’s losing ground, and nearly losing it.  At times, when the attacks were wounding deeply, Letts could do no more than sit with his head in his hands, trying to hold it together.  He strikes out, at Martha, at the guests, back at Nick’s apparent domestic bliss, but this doesn’t win him the upper hand.  Martha starts kicking him around and keeps kicking.  Here is where Morton is best.  She towers as Letts droops, rising up on a note of dangerous savagery, radiating pleasure in her success at manipulating him.

Finally, it goes too far.  Martha beats him down, airing with his failures.  He needs to win.  When she tells him she no longer cares about him and threatens to prove it with Nick, George has figured out his tactic.  He can play a long game.  He can sit by and let her instead of giving her the jealousy she’s trying to provoke.  He’s probably seen something like this before.  The games become shared inasmuch as he figures out what she’s up to.  The houseboy lines aren’t a routine, but him having figured out where Martha’s headed and moving to cut her off.  It takes on the same form as his competition with Nick, a need to take the path to outrun his opponent.

And he has his trump card.  The baby.  Here, the sense is that this is not their comforting fiction so much as Martha’s.  A fantasy that George can play along with, but which is really her necessity.  When she finally goes too far—the book, the failure, one blow too many—he has to resort to this.  He lets her walk right into her own downfall. Her belief in the lie was fine while it remained private, but she’s shared it and given him justification to end it.  When George “kills” the son, that final moment when Martha knows it cannot be undone, she lets loose with a wail and collapses.  He’s broken her. Tamed her.  He’s won.

I wouldn’t have expected such a final unbalance to work, but it does thanks to Letts. It’s his show.  He is deeply in tune with the politics of every moment and can switch from retreat to command of the stage in a moment.  Mindblowing and wonderful.  As we reach the end, it’s not the sky clearing as day breaks after the storm; we’re left with the survivors among the rubble, unsure where to go from here.