Virginia Woolf

"Edward Albee: A Singular Life," by Mel Gussow. Simon & Schuster. 432 pages. $30.Most biographers could not ask for a more challenging subject than Edward Albee, who throughout his career has remained masterfully circumspect about his private life, even while mining it for his most famous plays.Mel Gussow is equal to the task, and brings extraordinary rectitude and insight to the project of synthesizing Albee's life and work. "Edward Albee: A Singular Life" is a thoroughly absorbing book that functions not only as a biography, but as criticism, social history and psychological allegory.

"Edward Albee: A Singular Life," by Mel Gussow. Simon & Schuster. 432 pages. $30.Most biographers could not ask for a more challenging subject than Edward Albee, who throughout his career has remained masterfully circumspect about his private life, even while mining it for his most famous plays.Mel Gussow is equal to the task, and brings extraordinary rectitude and insight to the project of synthesizing Albee's life and work. "Edward Albee: A Singular Life" is a thoroughly absorbing book that functions not only as a biography, but as criticism, social history and psychological allegory.

"Reflections of a Ravaged Century," by Robert Conquest. W.W. Norton. 317 pages. $26.95.In his latest book, eminent British historian Robert Conquest, the current Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, presents a 342-page editorial that maps out conservative positions on literally dozens of contemporary issues. While provocative and always readable, he only occasionally bothers to cite sources or engage in serious historical analysis.Conquest's central point is that modern history has been plagued by totalistic ideologies, starting with the French Revolution, and achieving their most hideous form in 20th century National Socialism, to which he briefly alludes, and communism, with which he is preoccupied.

A successful production of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" should make the audience feel as uncomfortable as the two guests who find themselves trapped in a three-hour, scorched-earth, drunken brawl of a late-night cocktail party.And indeed, Theatre Hopkins' current production, under Suzanne Pratt's direction, creates the effect of being held hostage. It's an effect so palpable that, even knowing it was impossible, I kept wishing the guests, a clean-cut young couple named Nick and Honey, would manage to escape so the audience could also be freed of Albee's relentless torment.

Sex. Violence. Language. Religion.Hot-button topics all, guaranteed to start debate in the halls of Congress, arguments at cocktail parties and controversy when brought to movie screens.Forty-seven years ago, the intense sexuality of "A Streetcar Named Desire" ruffled America's feathers. Twenty-nine years ago, the numbing violence of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" had audiences wondering how far Hollywood should be allowed to go. Fourteen years ago, Jean-Luc Godard's "Hail Mary" had people crying blasphemy and dousing moviegoers with holy water.

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," by Mark TwainYes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.- "To the Lighthouse," by Virginia WoolfThat is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.- "Candide," by VoltaireTaking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache.

"Virginia Woolf," by Hermione Lee. Knopf. 900 pages. $39.95.Descriptives like "fresh" and "definitive" are frequently bandied about when discussing new biographies of old subjects; rarely are they accurate. Hermione Lee's work is both fresh and, unequivocally, definitive.One can hardly imagine a better or more comprehensive book on the premiere woman of letters of the 20th century. Absolutely mammoth, the book never bores. Lee's thorough research is matched by a vitality in her prose rarely found in the too-often tedious biography genre.

FIRLE, England - Quentin Bell, 85 and frail, remains a child of the Bloomsbury Group.His aunt, the author Virginia Woolf, once ridiculed him for being ignorant. The economist John Maynard Keynes regaled him with sightseeing tours of London.And his parents, Vanessa, the painter, and Clive, the art critic, introduced him to a bohemian lifestyle that encouraged free expression in art and in love."From an early age I knew that we were odd," Mr. Bell says in his new memoir, "Bloomsbury Recovered," summoning up his childhood at 46 Gordon Square near the British Museum in the Bloomsbury section of London.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The answer to Edward Albee's famous question must be: Biographers are afraid. Virginia Woolf is indisputably the most important and iconoclastic novelist of the 20th century, but a biography has yet to be written that both illumines her massive literary achievement and explores her complex private life. At fault: sexism, feminism and Freud.Panthea Reid appears to tread fearlessly into the arena of genius with "Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf" (Oxford University Press, 545 pages.

"Bloomsbury Recalled," by Quentin Bell. Columbia University Press. 234 pages. $24.95. Quentin Bell forgives his elders in this calm, generous memoir for all their painful, intimate flaws as members of the British artistic flowering known as Bloomsbury. He manages to sound always warm and kind even when offering reminders that the Bloomsbury circle of relatives and lovers and friends was as imperfect as it was gifted.The Bloomsbury Age lasted from 1910 to the eve of World War II - that informal, well-to-do collective of artistic and social experiments carried out in London and the Bells' country house and the house of the author's aunt and uncle, Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

It's a detail that the audience will never, in a million years, pick up from the darkened confines of Center Stage's Pearlstone Theater. Not even the actors are likely to look closely at that most unassuming of props: a partially empty bottle of Clorox. But Ellen Nielsen knows that the label contains three sections of advertising copy that actually was used on bottles of bleach in 1963, when Center Stage's current production, Caroline, or Change, is set. After all, Nielsen researched and found the exact wording, not to mention the precise weight and sheen of paper used to make labels in the early 1960s.

There's a reason that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? takes place in the enervating brown light of 2 a.m., as if viewed through a glass of brandy. Outside the windows, everything is dark. Inside, it's not much brighter. The four characters have pushed beyond tired and inebriated to a stumbling exhaustion. As Nick, a young professor says, "After a while, you don't get any drunker, do you?" In other words, they are at their most vulnerable. When the social order is overturned - when spouse attacks spouse, and hosts turn upon their guests - the four don't have a chance of protecting themselves.

Think of 2008 as the new New Frontier. The calendar might indicate that we're in the 21st century. But in merchandise display windows, on stage and on the large and small screen - and yes, even in politics - America seemingly is returning to the early, buttoned-down 1960s. Not long ago, society was enamored of the Greatest Generation. As the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor passed, we were bombarded with television specials, movies and fashion trends all inspired by the so-called "Last Good War."

Center Stage never has been a theater company for wimps, and the slate of six shows to be staged during the 2008-2009 season has the potential to deliver a powerful left hook. Four of the six shows scheduled for next season take as their subject matter such dark themes as incest, race relations and a terrifyingly toxic marriage. Things lighten up for the first show of the season - a classic light romance - and the last, a mischievous new comedy about backstage antics. The season contains the qualities that have become Center Stage hallmarks during Irene Lewis' 17-year tenure as the troupe's artistic director.

Yasmina Reza's Life x 3 is a play that owes a debt to Copenhagen, Rashomon and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Akira Kurosawa's movie Rashomon, it re-examines a central event from varying angles. And like Edward Albee's Virginia Woolf, the setup is an evening with two academic couples. Yet Reza's play (translated from the French by Christopher Hampton) defaults on the debt it owes its strong forebears. The central problem is that if a story is going to be retold several times, it is especially important that it be interesting the first time.

Four decades after its premiere, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has lost none of its sting. That's demonstrated with piercing precision in the production launching its national tour at Washington's Kennedy Center. On the surface, "precision" may seem the wrong word for what goes on in this play - a dark-night-of-the-soul account of a middle-aged professor and his wife who "entertain" a young couple by subjecting them, along with themselves, to a series of lacerating mind games: "Humiliate the Host," "Get the Guests," etc. WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF -- Through Jan. 28 at the Kennedy Center, Washington.

Theater `Virginia Woolf' in D.C. for a month A touring production of Ed ward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at the Kenne dy Center for the Performing Arts through Jan. 28. Today's performance is at 7:30 p.m. in the Eisenhower Theater, 2700 F St. N.W., Washington. Tickets are $25-$78. Call 800-444-1324 or go to ken nedy-center.org.

On Saturday, Kathleen Chalfant will be a one-woman party. That's when the New York actress will perform The Party - Ellen McLaughlin's adaptation of three Virginia Woolf short stories - at the Theatre Project's annual fundraising gala, an event that is itself a party. Portraying multiple characters - in this case, several partygoers and their hostess - is nothing new for Chalfant. For six years, she played half a dozen roles in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, earning a 1993 Tony Award nomination for her efforts.

Will audiences flock to the pitiful Derailed to see how Jennifer Aniston was handling her split from Brad Pitt when she was filming it a year ago? Has Robert Downey Jr. overcome the notoriety of his drug busts so that audiences can see what's evident in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - that he is the most gifted actor of his generation? Pundits blame the fiasco of Gigli on the over-covered affair of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez - just as they ascribe the box-office success of Mr. and Mrs. Smith to the over-covered affair of Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Edward Albee gave his 1998 play a deceptively simple title - The Play About the Baby. Part of the deception has to do with the baby, specifically, whether there is a baby. And, if there is, whether it's the same baby referred to in Albee's 1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What's not the least bit deceptive is the deep anguish you are left with at the end of The Play About the Baby, which is receiving a disturbing and moving Baltimore premiere at Fell's Point Corner Theatre, under the direction of Alex Willis.