A living room becomes a war zone in 'Virginia Woolf'

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on November 12, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

Today’s Toppman on the Arts is sponsored by The Mint Museum. See more than 100 stunning works by designer Judith Leiber in the exhibition "Brilliant by Design: The Handbags of Judith Leiber," on view now at Mint Museum Randolph.

by Lawrence Toppman

There’s something especially apt about seeing an intense play set entirely in a living room in a theater that’s not a whole lot larger than an actual living room. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” has come to the 80-seat Warehouse Performing Arts Center, where we watch characters sweat out their demons or try to suppress them just a few feet away.

Like Nick and Honey, the unsuspecting late-night guests at George and Martha’s home, we can’t get out of this hellish funhouse until the soul-shattering games have concluded. The trip to Cornelius will pay off for anyone who wants to experience the kind of classic drama local theater companies too seldom provide these days.

Edward Albee’s play seemed revolutionary when it won the Tony Award in 1962, but it really wasn’t. It took Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” which had won the same prize five years earlier, as its model: A three-hour drama, set in a single day in the living room of a family home, where the characters explore long-lasting psychological pain in a repetitive cycle that pits an older generation against a younger. The main female character in both is an addict: morphine in O’Neill, alcohol in Albee. Only the prospect of death, literal in O’Neill and metaphoric in Albee, can bring peace.

The strengths of “Woolf” and its main structural weakness remain intact after 64 years. The excoriating speeches still blast us, the unexpectedly funny lines still raise laughter, the hard-earned pathos of the ending still moves us deeply. Watching this for the third time onstage, though, I was struck more than ever by the fact that Nick and Honey have no real reason to endure their hosts’ torments; as a new teacher at the college run by Martha’s father, Nick doesn’t want to offend the boss’s daughter, but he and Honey could easily have slipped away.

I was struck by other details, too. George and Martha, the names of the first U.S. president and his wife, identify this quarreling pair with the American spirit itself. Honey’s no name at all, just a vague endearment, and the character’s equally bland and underwritten. "Old Nick" has long been a nickname for the Devil; George treats the young biology professor as such, warning that he’ll produce generations of soulless test-tube babies who have no room for poetry or philosophy in their lives. (Hey, wait a minute…) Even the title has meaning: George and Martha are desperately afraid of the shade of author Virginia Woolf, whose long depression ended in a troubled marriage and eventual suicide.

Director Nan-Lynn Nelson has made many sound decisions and one dreadful mistake, which can with some difficulty be tuned out. On the positive side, her constant realignment of the actors prevents the play from feeling static, she keeps the speeches moving swiftly, and she has elicited the right performances from her quartet.

Marla Brown has room-shaking intensity and moments of quiet fragility as Martha, while William Reilly’s long-maligned George seems an underdog at first but eventually asserts himself with menacing authority. Nobody could make Honey interesting in her one-note, brandy-sodden haze, but Allison Graham makes her appealing. Dalton Norman relies too much on smugness at first as the bored Nick but later finds desperation in the part after being played for a fool.

Alas, Nelson overlays the production with recorded music cues that are ill-timed, ill-chosen and so loud they obscure dialogue. When George and Martha discuss their unseen son, we get a laughably melodramatic crack-of-doom chord from a cello. An ear-splitting vocal by Adele undercuts a crucially tender scene. A speech about a saloon during Prohibition gets blurred by bar noises, anachronistic jazz and murmured conversations.

Albee trusted us to be smart enough to sift through thousands of words to find painful truths among the cruelly witty, sometimes anguished speeches. I wish Nelson hadn’t thought we needed blunt aural nudges to comprehend the play.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.