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Cackles, the type that hide horror behind laughter and terrify anyone listening, ring out through most of the trailer for Mike Nichols’s 1966 adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s famous play won a Tony in 1963 and has been revived countless times since, including Portland Center Stage’s current production, directed by Marissa Wolf and running through March ($24–93). It’s a brainy dark comedy about an insufferable couple—a history professor who’s married to the university president’s daughter—who torture guests at their campus house with increasingly dangerous, drunken bickering. Guns. Shattered glass. Sex, death, and so many lies. 

The play doesn’t explicitly have anything to do with the modernist novelist in its title. Instead, Albee once told The Paris Review that he saw the title as a “rather typical, university intellectual joke.” Swapped for the big bad wolf, of Disney fame, Woolf the author stands for “living life without false illusions.” And, these false illusions—I did say this was a brainy script—are the Godly force that used to guide most societies. In modern democracies, without the certainty of a theocracy’s higher power, we’re forced to reconcile all of our ugly little troubles for ourselves, that squirming thing called the human condition. George and Martha, the professor and president’s daughter, are quite the case study. 

George and Martha sing the titular song throughout the play (“Vir-gin-ia Woolf, Vir-gin-ia Woolf, Vir-gin-ia Woolf”). Though they usually start cackling before getting too far. It’s one of many in-jokes they use to torment the night’s victims, Nick and Honey, a young couple they invite over after a faculty party. George and Martha have an organized set of games designed for these nights, all of which jab deeper and deeper at each other’s personal traumas and grow to include more of society’s larger existential woes. Sometimes they bend their games to incorporate secrets gleaned from their guests. But as they work through their repertoire, the joke becomes more and more of a self-inflicted wound. As PCS dramaturg Kamilah Bush writes in a wonderful essay on the absurdist movement Albee worked within, both the movement and the play are about “a confrontation of self.” Just wait for Martha’s last line. 

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