E-Mail This Article to a Friend Woolf at the door Edward Albee and his stars prepare to play games BY CAROLYN CLAY

According to Elliot Norton’s Broadway Down East, when Edward Albee’s marathon exorcismal exercise in marital fisticuffs, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, first played Boston, in 1963, the city censor required the deletion of all taking of the Lord’s name in vain. The play’s not-infrequent explosions of "Christ" and "Jesus" were deemed "highly offensive" and had to go. "This time," Albee wants Bostonians to know, "we’ll be doing the entire play."

The three-time Pulitzer-winning dramatist, in town last month to promote the upcoming pre-Broadway engagement of the revival of Woolf starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, explained: "You may remember that there was a religious organization called the Catholic Church that had control over censorship of the arts in Boston — " "Lost a little power, maybe, hasn’t it?" chimed in Turner (if indeed that husky Jessica Rabbit voice can be said to chime). "I don’t know whether my cast made those cuts in 1963; I said they shouldn’t," Albee continued, reclaiming the floor. "But in case they made one or two, this is the full, unexpurgated play." Moreover, he added, "I haven’t rewritten the play. I don’t believe in two people writing the same play, and I’m not the same person I was 40 years ago."

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was first unleashed on Broadway in 1962; it won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and should have won the Pulitzer Prize, as recommended by the preliminary panel, but the Pulitzer honchos, perhaps put off by the many sacrileges afloat in an elegantly caustic sea of vitriol and liquor, decided to award no prize for drama that year. Since then, the work, which most know from the 1966 Mike Nichols film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as boozy jousters George and Martha, has been revived on Broadway only once — in 1976, directed by the playwright. (Of the celebrated film, Albee opined, "The only thing that bothered me was that I wrote the play in color but the movie was black and white.")

The 2005 production, which is directed by Brit Anthony Page (who has helmed several Albee plays in London), has been five or six years in the making, with numerous megawatt actors (rumored contenders included Jessica Lange and Jonathan Pryce) reading for the playwright. Said Albee of the pairing of film and stage star Turner and flexible New Vaudevillian Irwin: "This was the two that, when I heard them reading the very first time, I knew would be right. Listening to them read, I was taken right back, though not in the sense of imitation, to the experience of hearing [original Martha and George] Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill." "Edward," said Irwin of Albee, "is very deliberative. Kathleen and I read the play, and the call [offering him the role] came that afternoon."

Of course, Turner, a veteran of the 1989 film The War of the Roses, is no stranger to black-comic nuptial strife. Neither is she a stranger to Boston theatergoers, having appeared here in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Graduate, and Tallulah. Irwin — who is best known as the creator/star of Fool Moon, the Lucky of the fabled Robin Williams/Steve Martin Waiting for Godot, and the subject of the recent PBS telecast Bill Irwin Clown Prince — replaced Bill Pullman on Broadway as the bestial romancer of Albee’s Tony-winning The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?

One thing on which all three agreed is that the newest rendition of Woolf?, however wrenching, will be funny. Said Turner, "One thing I have always felt about the play was that it’s not as well known for its humor — and it’s black humor, which I appear through my choices in my career to have a predilection for." "It is interesting," Albee added, that "as much as I admired Alan Schneider’s [original] production, the production I directed in 1976 with Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara did bring out some of the dark humor of the play. I didn’t know it was so funny."

According to Irwin, "Edward is an alchemist. My approach to this play had to do with playing in his The Goat a couple of years ago. And on stage during the telling of that story was some of the hottest laughter I’ve ever felt as an actor in front of an audience, and I’ve spent a lot of years trying to make people laugh. So I wondered often, ‘What is the heat of this laughter coming from?’ And alchemically, two scenes later, the theater’s absolutely quiet and you can hear people leaning forward to hear what’s being said. I don’t know quite how he does it."

"Schizophrenia," Albee deadpanned by way of explanation.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? runs February 11 through March 6 at the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Tickets are $35 to $85; call (617) 931-ARTS, or drop in to the Wilbur box office.