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...And That's How You Play "Get The Guests" | The cast of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? prepares for a long night of dialogue.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Directed by Rob Moffatt. Written by Edward Albee. Starring David Ley, Linda Quibell, Eric Nyland, Ava Markus. Timms Centre for the Arts (University of Alberta). Sept. 18-27. Tickets: 420-1757/www.tixonthesquare.ca

Let’s be bold: Edward Albee’s 1962 magnum opus Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? may be the most quotable play since Hamlet. And while much of Albee’s dialogue may not equal Shakespeare in terms of poetry, he far outpaces him when it comes to sheer bitchiness. Take the moment where Martha repeatedly calls her husband George a “great big flop” for not having climbed higher in his university’s history department, and he smashes a bottle against a table — to which Martha cruelly remarks, “I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You don’t want to waste good liquor — not on your salary.”

Virginia Woolf is quotable both when it’s vulgar (it’s the play that added “hump the hostess” to the North American lexicon and made “monkey nipples” a term of endearment) and when it’s avoiding vulgarity (as when George refers to the bathroom as “the euphemism”). It’s even quotable when it’s quoting other sources, as when Martha imitates Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest saying, “What... a... dump!” at the top of Act One.

Accordingly, SEE asked the four cast members of Studio Theatre’s production of Virginia Woolf, as well as director Rob Moffatt, to name their favourite lines of dialogue from the play — either their own or someone else’s.

LINDA QUIBELL (Martha)

“I have lots of great moments, but for me, the best part is in the second act where George and I are declaring war on each other. I do think all of that friction and that anger between them comes out of a tremendous amount of love, which is easy to forget about. But I think there’s a moment in there where they’re not reconciling, but they’re at their most honest with each other. But it doesn’t work, and so they declare war on each other and go off. That’s the moment for me: when they say ‘Total war?’ ‘Total.’”

DAVID LEY (George)

“I have all sorts of tremendous literary moments. I love how I respond to Nick telling me ‘Up yours.’ It’s brilliant. He brings in the dies irae — ‘And what do the trumpets sound? “Up yours.”’ I mean, I’ve been basically saying ‘Up yours’ too all night, but I’ve been doing it a helluva lot more creatively than that! And I love the whole ‘And that’s how you play “get the guests”’ speech, that whole allegorical story about Honey’s hysterical pregnancy. It’s, like, two pages of text just to get to the punchline, which is ‘And then the puff went down.’ It’s wonderfully juicy and extremely horrible and deliciously ugly and creatively mean at the same time.”

AVA MARCUS (Honey)

“My favourite line is one where I’m not onstage. It’s one of George’s lines at the end of the second act where he talks about ‘the West, encumbered by crippling alliances and burdened by a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events will eventually fall.’ It’s from Decline of the West, but the idea that the empire will always fall is so juicy. I don’t know if I’m just apocalyptic, but I think the idea that the West’s life cycle is in decline is very resonant nowadays.”

ERIC NYLAND (Nick)

“I really like Martha’s line to George in Act One: ‘I swear, if you existed, I’d divorce you.’ It’s so funny, but it’s also a play that’s so much about things that don’t exist. It’s brought in so subtly; the line has huge resonance that’s not immediately apparent. That’s the one that sticks out for me.”

ROB MOFFATT (director)

“I picked George’s line from Act Three: ‘When you get down to the bone, all the way down, there’s something inside the bone — the marrow. That’s what you’ve got to get at.’ I think the characters are boring down into the core of their being. And just when you think there’s nowhere else to go, the play goes even further. The play is just so deep. There are only four characters, but it’s epic, it’s operatic. The dimensions are beguiling.”