Honey, the beleaguered faculty wife, isn’t the most deeply complex of Edward Albee’s great roles for women. But in Steppenwolf Theatre’s stellar production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carrie Coon does the role proud. Coon is familiar to Wisconsin theater-goers for her work with American Players Theatre, and for her recent terrific performances in Blackbird and Reasons to be Pretty with Renaissance Theatreworks. And with this high-profile role with Steppenwolf, praised in the national press, Coon seems poised to make a mark on the national stage.
Albee’s play is typically a showcase for the actors playing George and Martha. Since it premiered in 1962, the couple has been tackled by luminaries like Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (in the 1966 film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols) and Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin. Director Pam MacKinnon is Albee’s go-to director for recent productions of his work (she directed the Milwaukee Rep’s production of Bach at Leipzig in 2005), and she knows that the play is much more than a star vehicle.
The emotional fireworks are there, but they’re rooted in a solid sense of character in the ensemble. Tracy Letts, who is such a good playwright that some people have forgotten what a terrific actor he is, plays George with a simmering sense of self-loathing that doesn’t proclaim itself from the plays first moments. His sparring with Martha (longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton) is the kind of back and forth that could easily escalate into screeching over-dramatic tedium (as it did somewhat in Nichols’ film). But in MacKinnon’s finely tuned production, the tension builds slowly and surely to the story’s final catharsis.
As Honey, it’s Coon’s job to register that catharsis in a final, mute “Oh my God.” She’s an audience surrogate of sorts, someone who observes the proceedings first from the perspective of a squeaky clean naïf, and then when things begin to get almost phantasmagoric, from her drunken stupor. Coon manages this journey with great subtlety, entering the foreign territory of George and Martha’s house with her purse clutched in front of her like armor, and then opening herself to the evening as if absorbing the darkness of the modern world for the first time.
It’s a great performance that should continue to attract attention when the show transfers to the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. in February.
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
