Kathleen Turner's Official Website

The verdict is in from the New York Times!
(free registration required)
"Theatergoers who attend this revealingly acted new production, directed by Anthony Page, are destined to leave the Longacre feeling like winners, shaken but stirred by the satisfaction that comes from witnessing one helluva fight.

Tempering the play's notorious vitriol with eye-opening compassion, this interpretation restores characters who have acquired the faces of Freudian monsters to purely human form. In following Mr. Albee's account of a couple's long-night's journey into dawn, set at their home on an insular New England campus, Mr. Page and company have affectingly scaled a masterpiece back from operatic excess to the tautness of a chamber work.

They have done so without sacrificing the emotional intensity or the abundant, alarming humor that finds the gut-wrenching factor in belly laughs. And as the man-eating Martha, Ms. Turner, a movie star whose previous theater work has been variable, finally secures her berth as a first-rate, depth-probing stage actress. "

________

"Part of the gorgeousness, by the way, of Ms. Turner's performance is its lack of vanity. At 50, this actress can look ravishing and ravaged, by turns. In the second act, she is as predatorily sexy as she was in the movie "Body Heat." But in the third and last act she looks old, bereft, stripped of all erotic flourish.

When she sits at the center of the stage quietly reciting a litany of the reasons she loves her dearly despised husband, you feel she has peeled back each layer of her skin to reveal what George describes as the marrow of a person. I was fortunate enough to have seen Uta Hagen, who created Martha, reprise the role in a staged reading in 1999, and I didn't think I would ever be able to see "Virginia Woolf" again without thinking of Ms. Hagen.

But watching Ms. Turner in that last act, fully clothed but more naked than she ever was in "The Graduate," I didn't see the specter of Ms. Hagen. All I saw was Ms. Turner. No, let's be fair. All I saw was Martha."

Read the Full Review.