Tracy Letts (right) in The Realistic Joneses
- Tracy Letts (right) in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
New Haven audiences saw Tracy Letts as the intransigent, debilitated husband in the world premiere of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses at the Yale Repertory Theatre last spring. For Letts, that role followed stints as a middle-aged married man of decidedly different temperament, namely George in a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The production played in 2010 in Lett’s theatrical homebase, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Thatre. It was later seen at Arena Stage in Washington in 2011.
Letts is of course also a playwright. His Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County premiered at the Steppenwolf in 2007 and ran on Broadway from late 2007 to mid-2009. The national tour visited the Bushnell in Hartford.
Tracy Letts and the rest of the original Chicago cast of the Virginia Woolf revival—Amy Morton as Martha, Carrie Coon as Honey and Madison Dirks as Nick—bring the production to Broadway’s Booth Theater, with previews beginning this Thursday, September 27. Opening night, Saturday Oct. 13, has been timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original New York premiere in 1962.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is directed by Pam MacKinnon. It’s kind of a crime that Pam MacKinnon hasn’t directed anything in New Haven. She’s directed Bruce Norris’ The Unmentionables at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre; the play later done at the Yale Rep but directed by Anna Shapiro. MacKinnon directed Albee’s A Delicate Balance at Arena Stage around the same time that it was also at the Rep, but directed there by James Bundy. MacKinnon’s most famous credit is as the director of both New York productions of Norris’ Clybourne Park, at Playwrights Horizon in 2010 and the one which closed earlier this month at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre. The Long Wharf is doing its own production of Clybourne Park next spring, directed by Eric Ting.
Offstage, Pam MacKinnon been in a relationship for years with John Proccacino, a favorite Long Wharf Theater actor who starred in the theater’s productions of Syliva, Italian-American Moon Reconciliation, A Moon for the Misbegotten and We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!
As for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, one of the most talked-about productions of the play in the 1990s was in Connecticut: it was at Hartford Stage, directed by Paul Weidner and starring Marlo Thomas, Robert Foxworth, Heather Ehlers and Burke Moses. For his part, Albee has regularly spoken at Yale and was the inaugural judge of the Yale Drama Series Award.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is began on Broadway and became a major motion picture starring Hollywood royalty Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But the play has really belonged to the regional theater movement for decades now, and it’s fitting that a 50th anniversary revival has come out of Chicago.