'Virginia Woolf' turns 50, with potent new revival

• Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts makes Broadway acting debut.
• *** 1/2 out of four
• The revival opened exactly 50 years after the play premiered on Broadway

NEW YORK — Though Tracy Letts began his career as an actor, he became a Broadway star for his work offstage, as the playwright who in 2008 collected both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County, a darkly hilarious, deeply unsettling study of an embattled Oklahoma family.

So it's fitting that Letts should make his Main Stem acting debut in another celebrated account of distinctly American dysfunction, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In a new revival (* * * ½ out of four) that opened Saturday at the Booth Theatre — exactly 50 years after Virginia Woolf had its first Broadway bow — Letts delivers a performance as richly nuanced and ferociously entertaining as his August text.

He's cast as George, a middle-aged associate professor at a small New England college and the long-suffering husband of Martha, the acid-tongued and — as he reminds us repeatedly — slightly older daughter of the college president. Though Martha immediately establishes herself as the alpha figure in one of theater's most famously contentious marriages, the play derives its punch from the power struggle that develops, and the sense of interdependence that emerges, as George crawls out of his shell.

Letts relays this dark-horse quality as powerfully as any performer this critic has seen in the role. From his masterfully acerbic rebuttals to Martha's initial barrage of insults, this George proves that he isn't the mere simp his wife describes but rather a simmering cauldron of frustration and disappointment. And he lets the lid off with an unmannered intensity that is as bracing as it is convincing.

Of course, any production of Woolf relies on the strength of its four-member cast; and this one, transferred from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, has no weak links. Both Letts and Amy Morton, who plays Martha, are longtime Steppenwolf ensemble members who have a shared history with the play: Morton directed her co-star in a 2004 staging at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre.

Morton's savage but ultimately poignant Martha is, in keeping with Letts' stringent delivery, drier and less flamboyant than Kathleen Turner's in the last Broadway revival, or Elizabeth Taylor's in the film adaptation. As George and Martha fortify themselves and ply their houseguests, an ambitious young academic and his hapless wife, with endless rounds of booze, director Pam MacKinnon keeps the atmosphere tense but distinctly non-operatic, so that we feel less like audience members observing iconic characters than flies on the wall at an increasingly out-of-control party.

As the guests, Nick and Honey, Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon are fine foils. Dirks' slick Nick, who quickly becomes the target of George's bitterness and Martha's lust, captures the hollowness and impotence (on several levels) that define his role. Coon's Honey is at once fetching and pitiable, and a marvelously fluid drunk.

You'll leave the gathering shaken and sobered, but also exhilarated. All golden anniversaries should be this memorable.