Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Watched this afternoon the Steppenwolf's production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? A colleague described the attacks that husband George and wife Martha direct against each other as corrosive. And she is right. But I was surprised by how moving and tender were some of the quieter moments of the play. The couple need each other as much as they hate each other. George (Tracy Letts), who married the daughter of his college president, is a coward and a failure as far as his wife is concerned, but she needs his need for her, her need exacerbated by her fear of abandonment. Martha (Amy Morton), who is alcoholic, is emasculating in her taunts, but George wants to be punished for his obscure guilt over the deaths of his parents. Their love-hate relationship is played out in the form of horrendous games in front of their guests Nick (Madison Dirks) and Honey (Carrie Coon), games like Humiliate Your Host and Hump Your Hostess. When Martha breaks the rule of ...

Highly entertained and moved by the magnificent vitriol of August: Osage County , I was looking forward to Tracy Letts's latest play. Superior Donuts , playing at The Music Box, was disappointing. The plotting and characters seemed to have come out of an extended TV episode. The writing, sprinkled with punchy one-liners, was as funny as a superior sitcom. Arthur Przybyszewski, the owner of a donut shop in uptown Chicago, evaded life and love until Franco Wicks, a young aspiring black writer who worked for him, changed him, and Arthur stood up for Franco and himself. He did so in a long fight sequence that was painful to watch because it was so bad. This was not the only mistake made by director Tina Landau. Another, more minor but telling, was the inconsistent behavior of the characters to winter in Chicago, as TH pointed out to me. The last scene compounded poor writing and directing. The characters made their excuses, one by one, to leave the shop, so as to ...