Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• Written by Edward Albee
• Directed by John Wright
• Starring Gabrielle Rose, Kevin McNulty, Meg Roe and Craig Erickson
• At the Vancouver East Cultural Centre

There's a certain calibre of play that reads like the music of Mozart. Take one note out and the structure collapses. Make one unconfident move, and its artifice lies naked before a distracted audience. Edward Albee's masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is such a play. And Blackbird Theatre's smart new production, which runs through three hours of malicious fights, backstabbing, and word games like a knife through butter, is worthy of Albee's greatness.

The scene is a 1960s living room belonging to put-upon history professor George (Kevin McNulty) and his shrewish wife Martha (Gabrielle Rose). The shag carpet and mid-century furnishings are, in fact, a domestic battlefield where George and Martha, having returned drunk and ornery from a party, proceed to eviscerate each other as only a long-married couple can. Rose delivers a Martha elemental in her rage, yet terribly efficient, too; she makes every word do work. McNulty is long-suffering as George and, though I sometimes wished he would up his character's sinister qualities, the restraint creates a bizarre sweetness between George and Martha that is this production's most startling feature.

Their arguments, their clawing, is not merely fun to watch, after all; George and Martha are stripping away the pretense of their modern, middle-class lives.

And they have an audience: An equally soused couple – Nick and Honey – drop by for a nightcap and become enlisted in the older couple's humiliations and screaming matches. Craig Erickson and Meg Roe are perfectly cast. He's a stew of anxieties but begins to relax as Martha comes on to him; she's a mousy castoff from Pleasantville with great comic moments once the liquor kicks in. By the end, they're exhausted and watching their own doomed future being played out by the booze-soaked, wailing, elders.

Still, John Wright's direction reveals a sad, impossible heart thrumming beneath the play's taut muscles. The play's title calls up Woolf's novels, which insist that one look at the horrifying truth of social exchanges. Albee's couple – childless and marooned in middle age – is only superficially vicious; they're engaged in a heroic attempt to beat away milquetoast niceties, the distractions of polite society, and burrow toward what George calls “the marrow.” Once they get to their personal heart of darkness, George and Martha are bereft and raw, but strangely reconciled to one another. Both Woolf and Albee, in their very separate styles, issue that same draconian command: “You shall not look away. You shall look on this and it will make you better.”

In 2007, Blackbird Theatre received the Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Production to mark a phenomenal Peer Gynt (in which Erickson had the title role); in 2008, the company again took home the top Jessie honour for their triumphant The Triumph of Love ; and they may well have done it again. This witty, trenchant, and vastly enjoyable show is offensive, terrifying, and utterly engrossing. And, yes, it'll make you better.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? runs until January 16.

Special to The Globe and Mail