Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe trick of stage acting comes in playing the same thing every night as if it were happening for the first time, right there in front of the audience’s eyes.
But once-controversial American classic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” calls for something different. Edward Albee wrote a play in which we get to observe a cruel and competitive game of escalating insults between career-stalled history professor George and Martha, the wife who makes vicious sport of her disappointment.
In the gnarly “Groundhog Day” nightmare that is their marriage, the trick is to distinguish those moves that rupture the routine — which is precisely how director Gordon Greenberg approaches the boozy battle royale in a 60th-anniversary production for the Geffen Playhouse featuring Zachary Quinto and Calista Flockhart.
A play of this magnitude calls for two titans in the lead roles, not a couple of yesterday’s-news TV stars. Who didn’t love Flockhart on “Ally McBeal” back in the day, or Quinto on “Heroes”?
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