“I swear to GOD George, if you even EXISTED I’d divorce you.”

I must see this: the revival of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which just opened here in New York. I had heard about the production long before it arrived, and thought: Of course. Kathleen Turner is perfect for that part. Beyond perfect. She was born to play it. (For your added pleasure, here’s a long article about her in the Times, and her preparation to play this part. I love this: She said “I’ve been getting ready ever since college. Back then I told myself, when I’m 50, this is my role. And guess what, the week I turned 50, last June, they gave it to me.” The article gives me a deeper understanding of her, and what the past 10 or 15 years have been like for her.)

But stuff like this, big revivals, have a way of crashing and burning. Not so this one, according to the review.

First paragraph:

Everybody ultimately loses in Edward Albee’s great marital wrestling match of a play from 1962. But theatergoers who attend this revealingly acted new production, directed by Anthony Page, are destined to leave the Longacre feeling like winners, shaken but stirred by the satisfaction that comes from witnessing one helluva fight.

That’s it, isn’t it … that’s how the play SHOULD leave you. I’m thrilled. I need to get my act together and get tickets.

I’ve always been a Kathleen Turner fan, too. I stick up for her when she is criticized. As though I know her. I have no idea why I feel protective towards her, but I do. Maybe because I think she’s feckin’ awesome, and over the last 15 years or so has not gotten the movie role to prove it. (That’s what reaching a certain age’ll get ya, if you’re a woman.) I mean, I loved her in Romancing the Stone. Who can forget her in Body Heat? I loved her in War of the Roses too.

I’m so so glad, then, to read the reviews she is currently getting. Good. For. Her.

Here’s a bit from the review about her performance:

And as the man-eating Martha, Ms. Turner, a movie star whose previous theater work has been variable, finally secures her berth as a first-rate, depth-probing stage actress.

Yay! I KNEW it, I knew she had it in her. She was in the terrible production of The Graduate on Broadway – I saw it – and her performance was criticized for being “over the top”. I disagreed. It WAS over-the-top but I thought that she was doing what the part demanded and I felt like the rest of the cast phoned in their performances from down the street, and should have raised themselves up to HER level. The only reason she seemed “over the top” was because she was the only one who was really DOING the play. I thought she was terrific – although the play was quite terrible.

And once again, a review like this is why I am so grateful that Ben Brantley is reviewing for The New York Times. He even apologizes to the lead actors for thinking ahead of time that they would be bad. (This kind of open-ness is the very thing that makes people scoff and scorn Ben Brantley, but I think those people are pretentious snobs. I’ve written about the appeal of Brantley’s reviews here before. I think he’s a very important critic.)

Here’s more:

Ms. Turner’s Martha is a stunningly spontaneous creature, a wayward life force, while Mr. Irwin’s George is a contained, angular study in self-consciousness. It’s clear that she acts from instinct, while he never stops strategizing. But as they entertain (read: vivisect) themselves and their young guests, you sense their utter interdependence.

Watch how their eyes keep brushing over each other, sometimes with brutal briskness, but sometimes warmly as well. They are always assessing with those gazes, both to anticipate possible attacks and to confirm a bond that is the only real security either knows. They are as deeply comfortable in their mutual discomfort as they are with their book-lined living room (designed with just the right hint of slovenliness by John Lee Beatty).

How beautiful. So many critics can’t be bothered to ever discuss the … er … ACTING. Uhm … who’s up there actually doing the thing? And if they suck, then WHY do they suck? Bad reviews are often the most revealing, if it can actually take a gander at what ISN’T present. That is when a critic truly serves a purpose to the theatrical community. But when the review is only the critic blathering on about Artaud, and theatrical theory, and how “the definitive production of this play took a post-Orwellian view of modern-day suburbia…” blah blah blah … and then at the very end of the review each actor is summed up with one adjective only – I get very very annoyed. “Joe Smith is appealing, Reginald Nigel is powerful, and Susie Schmoozy rounds out the cast with her sense of girlish wonder.” Blah blah. I cannot stand reviews like that.

These people are theorists, and have no idea what actors do and why (on rare occasions) it can be so miraculous. And if it’s not miraculous, then they have no idea why it’s not, and can’t begin to even think about it.

Brantley gets that. I always read his reviews to see how he talks about the acting itself. I always learn something. In his blistering review of the recent Little Women, he addresses what he saw to be Sutton Foster’s problems as an actress (at least in this material). Sutton Foster is a huge Broadway star, a young woman who hit it huge with The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Sutton Foster has lived a charmed life since then, but Brantley discusses what he felt was missing in her work. It’s rare to read a reviewer who is actually qualified to talk about acting in any knowledgeable way.

Here Brantley describes Bill Irwin’s performance of “George” in the play:

Mr. Irwin boldly conceives George less as an emasculated bull à la Burton than as a man of defensive asexuality and carefully modulated whimsy. He lives beneath a shield of artfully contrived mannerisms. But you are always aware of the toll exacted by this posture, and every so often a crippled smile breaks through, chilling in its pain and hostility.

I have to see this.

And he ends the review with such a punch that in fact I am in tears right now.

Part of the gorgeousness, by the way, of Ms. Turner’s performance is its lack of vanity. At 50, this actress can look ravishing and ravaged, by turns. In the second act, she is as predatorily sexy as she was in the movie “Body Heat.” But in the third and last act she looks old, bereft, stripped of all erotic flourish.

When she sits at the center of the stage quietly reciting a litany of the reasons she loves her dearly despised husband, you feel she has peeled back each layer of her skin to reveal what George describes as the marrow of a person. I was fortunate enough to have seen Uta Hagen, who created Martha, reprise the role in a staged reading in 1999, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to see “Virginia Woolf” again without thinking of Ms. Hagen.

But watching Ms. Turner in that last act, fully clothed but more naked than she ever was in “The Graduate,” I didn’t see the specter of Ms. Hagen. All I saw was Ms. Turner. No, let’s be fair. All I saw was Martha.

The ultimate compliment. I MUST see this production.