Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Original title Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Première 25. september 2022, Mini teater, Ljubljana

Running time 2 hours. No intermission. 

Director Ivica Buljan
Translator Zdravko Duša
Dramaturg Diana Koloini
Stage designer Aleksandar Denić
Costume designer Ana Savić Gecan
Music selection Benjamin Krnetić
Lighting and video designers son:DA, Toni Soprano Meneglejte
Language consultants Jože Faganel, Simon Šerbinek
Assistant director Peter Srpčič
Make-up and hair stylist Mirela Brkić
Assistant dramaturg Manca Majeršič Sevšek 

Cast
Nataša Barbara Gračner
Branko Šturbej
Benjamin Krnetić
Klara Kuk

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one of the most famous and most frequently staged plays of the 20th century. When it first opened on Broadway in 1962, it excited mass audiences but upset critics with its brutal language and its harsh vivisection of a married couple’s life. Similarly, the cult 1966 film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in Hollywood. The play, with a provocative take on the children’s song "Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" in its title, is set in the ostensibly genteel intellectual environment of academia, which soon reveals its many complex problems and cruelties. At the behest of the older, veteran couple Martha and George, the seemingly ordinary social gathering of two couples from very different generations turns into a relentless confrontation of every aspect of ambitions, social status and profound personal disappointment over unfulfilled desires. The narrative constellation of a woman and a man, trapped in an unresolvable cycle of hate and love, is positioned into a tight dramatic grip of truth and illusion where not only lies but mostly (self-)deceptions reign supreme. Even more than the demand for success, the phantasm of personal fulfilment is fueled by the idea of a child, which reveals the destructiveness of illusion and the need for true love in their totality. Since the time it was written, Albee’s play has not aged. Quite the opposite: with its central themes – the demand for success, patriarchal domination and the myth of the happy family with children – it is more pertinent today than ever.