‘Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf’ Gives Albee a Good Spank Over the Knee

By: David Cote

Last year the Edward Albee estate denied a theater in Portland, Oregon the rights to perform Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Why? Nick, the ambitious biology professor, was to be played by an African-American actor. The frustrated director posted on Facebook, and soon Albee’s executors were being denounced for literal-mindedness verging on racism.

I’m sure they’d be even less inclined to greenlight Kate Scelsa’s freewheeling riff on the 1962 classic. In Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf, Nick (Mike Iveson) is certainly white, but he also writes slash fiction about male vampires and werewolves from the Twilight franchise hooking up and getting pregnant (a subgenre called “slash mpreg”). But, hey: Who’s afraid of the Albee estate? Not Scelsa. Her breezily intertextual, polysexual, queer-feminist dance remix reclaims that barren harridan Martha in the name of parody. Here’s a fruity summer cocktail for folks who like their yuks broad and their literary cuts deep.

Everyone’s Fine starts as community-theater Woolf, complete with mismatched thrift-store furniture and cheapo painted backdrops that shudder with each door slam (faux-naïf set by Louisa Thompson). Morosely closeted George (Vin Knight) enters and grumbles the line normally brayed by Martha: “What a dump.” To be sure, dumping is what Scelsa, director John Collins and their troupe, Elevator Repair Service (ERS), have in mind: A mass deposit of theatrical allusions and styles, postmodern textual strategies and pop trivia.

Martha (Anne McNamara, a brassy, mercurial treasure) enters after her spouse and tells him they’re expecting guests—to whom she has spilled all their secrets: “You’re totally gay and I’m a little gay. We have an imaginary son and an imaginary dog and I loved the dog more and you killed the son.” With basically all of Albee’s existential shocks out of the way, George and Martha welcome younger couple Honey (April Matthis, demurely oddball) and Nick (Iveson). Let the games begin.

Excerpt from “‘Everyone’s Fine With Virginia Woolf’ Gives Albee a Good Spank Over the Knee” by David Cote. Read the full article here.