Word: martha
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Hendrickson's churning account begins with an anonymous man's attempt to throw McNamara overboard during a ferry ride to Martha's Vineyard in 1972. Many of Hendrickson's scenes and anecdotes first appeared in the Washington Post in the mid-'80s. Here the journalist looks further into McNamara's brilliant careers at the Harvard Business School and the Ford Motor Co. The record reveals a top-of-the-line number cruncher steeped in the values of corporate loyalty. But as Secretary of Defense, his mistakes cost lives, not shareholder dividends. And yet his responsibilities required a level of abstraction...
...pair's catty and provocative banter heightens quickly into sneerful braying as Martha announces that, at daddy's request, she's invited a young couple over for a nightcap. The jocky, naively ambitious biology professor Nick (Roy Souza) and his cotton-candy wifelet Honey (Nicole Jesson) arrive amidst a jeering exchange of expletives. At first bubbling with apologies and awkwardness, they soon fall immediately into their hosts' manipulative and destructive games. Surrounded by a well-stocked bar and worn volumes on the shelves (including such too-apt titles as "The Possessed," "Illusions," "Gamesman" and "Father's Day"), the elder couple...
...more energetic, throughout the course of the night. Ayres roars appropriately through lines like "I'm running this show!" as he conducts the latest game, "Get the Guests;" and he dryly combines hate, humbleness and irony as he retorts to Nick's accusation: "Because you're going to hump Martha, I'm disgusting?" The only break in Ayres' intensity occurred in the scene when George shoots Martha with what seems at first to be a shotgun, but releases only an umbrella; because of prop difficulties, Ayres had to shake the gun and quickly urge the gag out of the barrel...
Moulton also adeptly portrays the transformation of Martha, screeching comments and complaints about anything from Bette Davis movies to the worst of her husband's pathetic qualities, then cooing sexual yet motherly come-ons at Nick, and finally, reduced to her befuddled, infantile core, gasping lines like "I'm cold" and "I don't know." Moulton's appearance and costume, however, tend toward the exaggerated side of middle-class, middle-aged skank, and it often lessens the plausibility and fluidity of some scenes. Albee describes Martha's character as "A large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger, ample...
...Delvena Theatre Company's production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" climaxes expertly in a strangely heartening final scene, the game "Bringing up Baby." Stripped and exposed, Martha and George cling to each other, their future a possibility but their solitude a reality...