Don’t be afraid of this ‘Virginia Woolf’ production

I once saw an actress who played Martha in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in an actual black fright wig.

In Valerie Carpenter Bernstein’s hilariously frightening portrayal of the role for this production by Poor Richard’s Players at the Onyx Theatre, the fright wig is understood. A primitive savagery lurks just beneath a thin veneer of civility.

Albee’s classic drama deals with such epic topics as the biblical theme of barrenness and the demise of the liberal worldview in the birth of a savage new scientific paganism. Benjamin Lowey expertly directs his talented cast in delivering Albee’s eloquently over-the-top language through performances that are emotionally devastating.

George and Martha are a middle-age academic couple who have invited a younger colleague and his wife over for a nightcap after a university faculty party in New Carthage. Quickly, the unwitting Nick and Honey are dragged into the psychodrama of George and Martha’s personal Punic War. None will emerge unscathed.

The central theme of childlessness with allusions to abortion and artificial insemination will be painfully relevant to many couples who delayed starting families and yearn for the elusive happiness of the American nuclear family, only to suffer the reality of empty-womb syndrome. The savagery of Martha’s desperation to obtain sperm from virile younger faculty men, like Nick, is part of gay playwright Albee’s peeling away of the heterosexual labels of husband as provider and wife as bearer of 1.5 children.

Because George can’t give Martha what she desperately wants, he is subjected to three hours of emasculation. That George emerges intact as a man is a testament to the strength of Taylor Hanes’ characterization. As a professor of history who is being overtaken by the brave new world of Nick the biologist, Hanes’ George is aware of his own obsolescence. His love for Martha is mixed with rage because she can’t give him what he most needs.

Hanes delivers all this with slight changes in his smile, shifting from convivial to a death’s head rictus. Slight inflections of his voice elicit laughter or tears from the audience.

Bernstein’s Martha is little short of a monster, yet as played by Bernstein she is never unsympathetic. Though loud and vulgar, Bernstein doesn’t overplay Martha as a harridan. The sexy but not slutty “Sunday-go-to-meeting” dress that Martha slips into to be “more comfortable” around Nick is a perfect symbol of Bernstein’s highly nuanced performance — kudos to costume designer Karalyn Clark.

In George and Martha’s histrionics as two people co-dependent in their mutually assured destruction, Hanes and Bernstein are deeply convincing as a married couple whose illusions have ossified over decades.

It just gets better with Brandon McClenahan and Rachel Perry as Nick and Honey. The two supporting actors are outstanding in roles that play almost “straight” to George and Martha’s murderous slapstick. McClenahan’s Nick starts out looking like a cipher getting bullied by Hanes’ dominating George. But McClenahan’s arrogant Nick masks a monstrous vanity behind his bland facade.

The testosterone-fueled verbal swordsmanship of Hanes and McClenahan leaves the stage bloody from their wounded masculine egos.

Perry as Honey is sweetly ditzy, and she delivers one of the funniest deadpans in the play. Even though she spends a lot of time throwing up from too much brandy, she brings a quiet dignity to her role so Nick’s betrayal of faith makes him look like a bigger heel. Like Martha, she has her own gynecological secrets.