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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ran September 12–28, 2025, at Riverside Theatre. Read our interview below with Riverside Producing Artistic Director (and director of the show) Adam Knight, and Riverside Theatre’s Director of Outreach & Education, Kathleen Johnson.
What first drew you to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? How did you decide that it was a show Riverside should do?
AK: Riverside had not produced an American classic in a few years, and I was particularly interested in the challenge of working on a play like Eward Albee’s that stretches the boundaries of realism without breaking them. I had not read the play in about 20 years, and diving back into it made me realize that it still resonates deeply – especially in a university town.
This play has been called both brutally funny and devastatingly honest — how do you balance those tones in your direction?
AK: The film version (while brilliant) has trouble capturing just how funny Albee’s work can be. Albee has a mischievous bent and loved to get the audience off balance, and his word play provides the tonal shifts that do a lot of the work for us. I learned from working on other “difficult” plays such as The Winter’s Tale that shock and laughter often go hand in hand. For this play, we simply aimed to play every moment as truthfully as we could – to believe in the given circumstances of the play (however far-fatched). I think that the humor comes when the decorum keeps getting broken and the night continues in spite of itself. Or, for instance, when someone says something revolting, then corrects the grammar of their sentence. It’s very human, this need for little corrections without seeing the big problems in front of us.
Edward Albee wrote the play in the early 1960s. What feels timeless about it, and what feels newly relevant today?
AK: The heart of the play is the relationships between these four people. The role that illusion can play in a marriage and how it can be both a balm and a crutch. And the need for strength and to be understood… the ways that we can disappoint one another to the core. But Albee also sets up an allegory whereby George and Martha represent the dying vestiges of Western civilization, over-educated and over-imbibed, living in the ivory tower of education, immersed in the liberal arts. They face the “new” couple from the midwest who, in some ways, represent the same threats that the Soviet Union had on America – homogeny, systematic inevitability, scientific prowess. When the Berlin Wall fell in the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama declared this moment “The End of History”, with the West victorious. How wrong that declaration now seems. The insecurities of George, along with his and Martha’s decent into the absurd, seem very relevant to America’s current moment.
The relationship between George and Martha is one of the most iconic in American theatre. How did you work with the actors to capture both the ferocity and intimacy of that partnership?
AK: I spent about two days working solely with Tim Budd and Kristy Hartsgrove Mooers to go through the play and talk about the relationship between them, especially their backstory. Both came to the table with so many insights and it became clear that there is, at the heart of this play, a deep love that can sometimes get masked by the histrionics. Their performances are very special in this regard – love looms larger in our production than in some. Nonetheless there is this metaphorical volcano that erupts – really two volcanos. The challenge for us was finding the early moments where the magma spits out of their dialogue, when folks get burned. This prepares the audience for the real tragedy to come.
What about Honey and Nick? What role do you think they play in the story? What was your biggest challenge in staging this production, and how did you solve it?
AK: For several spells of the play, Nick and Honey are mostly listening. Lauren Galliart and Devon Stone are wonderful to watch in these sections, because we see not only the communication between them in their reactions, but also how their paths are separating over the course of the evening. The danger of these roles is that they read too archetypal – the perfect American couple – and both performers find these little cracks in the polished facades early that build to a shattering later.
How did you collaborate with your design team to create the sense of a living room that becomes both home and battlefield?
AK: With any full-length play, groundplan is so key. We aimed to make a living room that made sense for George and Martha – a place where they entertain, but also with clues about their habits and patterns. The play goes to some very big places within realism, and so finding the symbolic in the everyday was a fun exploration. There is a great moment at the end of Act II where some lamps have been turned off, leaving George on one side of the stage and Martha is on the other: a deep chasm of darkness between them. And the costumes are so fun! They provide a bit of early sixties levity that the play cuts through like a knife.
Rehearsals for such an emotionally intense play can be demanding. How did you help the cast navigate that intensity while keeping the work fresh and alive?
AK: Intimacy Director Carrie Pozdol and Stage Manager Meenakshi Chinmai were great resources for the performers and helped us all stay in tune with ourselves in the midst of this process. The room was incredibly positive. Even in the crunch time leading up to first performance, there was a general feeling that were were all in this together and would pick each other up if anyone needed a hand.
What has surprised you most during this process? As a director, what did you learn while working on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
AK: I really had to step up my game! Many long hours in front of the script, working out the staging and asking myself repeatedly what each moment is about. It is a deceptively simple piece, with only four actors and taking place in a living room. It turned out to be one of the most complex pieces I have ever encountered, needing inspired contributions from our production department, from designers, from the cast and crew, much of it woven very finely into the text. I think it underlined for me how great theatre must come out of collaboration and trust, forged by a shared belief in the story we are telling.
At its core, the play asks audiences to sit with uncomfortable truths about marriage, identity, and illusion. What questions do you hope audiences leave the theatre asking themselves? What do you hope they take away from this production?
AK: Albee was like a Greek tragedian, showcasing the extremes of the human experience in order to bring the audience to catharsis: a purification. I believe that the experience of catharsis is sacred and has its own individual mystery. I am hesitant to put it into words because each person’s reaction might be – must be – very unique to them. I know that this play and these performances conjure in me deep questions and big feelings, leaving me exhausted in the best of ways… exhausted, yet somehow ebullient!