Crying ‘Woolf’: Vortex celebrates 50th anniversary with classic, great plays

It’s the play that cried Woolf — Virginia Woolf that is.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is showing Friday, March 20, through Sunday, April 12, at The Vortex Theatre. 

Director James Cady said the play is all about secrets. 

“We have secrets in marriage — our husbands, our wives, they don’t know everything about us,” Cady said, “but suddenly this is revealed in one drunken night.” 

The play was written by Edward Albee and premiered on stage in 1962. Since then, it has been performed on countless stages, and in 1966 was made into a movie that Cady said “broke all the rules of filmmaking.”

The Vortex staged “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1980 and 2009 at its old location on Buena Vista Drive SE. The playhouse turns 50 this year and is bringing back its “great plays,” Cady said. 

“(The Vortex) considered ‘Virginia Woolf’ to be one of those plays,” he said.

Cady said it’s his job as director to get the best possible actors and let them loose to do their thing. 

“It’s their creation, their family that they’re living in,” Cady said, “and I want to encourage that as much as possible.”

Cady said another responsibility as a director is to “see the playwright’s vision and try to make it happen on stage,”  including accurately depicting the play’s setting and time period — which in the case of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is a living room in the 1960s.

The show is staged around the home of George and Martha, who are bringing back friends after a late night at a faculty party. 

Cady said while the play happens in the 1960s, he kept in mind how the couple would have decorated their home over the 23 years they had lived there. 

“You start to furnish a house, not in the period, not in the year that the play is taking place,” Cady said, “but you have to say, ‘OK, do they buy furniture in 1945 … or did they add to it?’” 

He said the setting is one reason he considers “Virginia Woolf” a great play. 

Modern television, he said, has many scenes and places to add to the overall length of the story. He said a great playwright, like Albee, can keep a play long while centralizing it in one location. 

As the play returns for the theater’s anniversary, Cady said it felt great to be the one helping bring it to The Vortex stage.

“When I go to rehearsal, there’s no other place I’d rather be,” he said.

Elizabeth Secor is an arts fellow from the New Mexico Local News Fellowship program. You can reach her at esecor@abqjournal.com.