Today's the 128th birthday of Virginia Woolf, whom no one is afraid of anymore but who is still best known as a pioneer of the 20th-century novel, capturing the processes of memory and perception in precise, lyrical prose. Who knew she also had a wacky side? NPR's Weekend Edition reported this morning that the wackier Woolf is on view in her one and only play, Freshwater, which opens tonight at the Women's Project in NYC under the direction of Anne Bogart. I studied with Anne and several of the actors in Freshwater — including Kelly Maurer, pictured above w. Gian-Murray Gianino — in a summer workshop of Bogart's SITI Company, and can attest to their being sufficiently precise, lyrical and wacky to be ideally suited to Freshwater's world — though we'll find out what the critics think later this week.
This article appears in Jan 21-27, 2009.