Don’t Be Afraid To See This Play!
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Hits Kayenta Stage Late March
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one of the most talked-about and most rarely performed plays in existence. No one really wants to do it. We see two conforming couples in the 1960s who have just met one another commit adultery for revenge, publicly shame one another, reveal highly embarrassing secrets, and cathartically regain the truth about their love in the end. When you have to live with someone you can’t stand, you know how to hurt them and how to make them laugh, so the onstage antics become bombastically hilarious in one breath and gravely serious in the next. It’s Home Alone meets Lord of the Flies. This is a play whose publishing house requires a minimum of four and a half weeks of rehearsals before adding technical elements.
Kayenta Arts Foundation, just west of Tuacahn, is combing two highly reactive substances: the infamous play itself and the man they chose to direct the project–Clarence Gilyard, Jr. This stage and screen veteran of Walker Texas Ranger, Matlock, Top Gun, and Die Hard directed Red at Center For the Arts at Kayenta (CFAK) in October, and has since joined the CFAK team as Associate Director. This comes in addition to his already full teaching schedule as a professor in the University of Nevada Las Vegas theatre department.
Gilyard jumped on the opportunity to make an artistic difference at Kayenta despite the time he would need to spend away from his own family in Las Vegas because of two friends and kindred spirits—CFAK’s Executive Director Jan Broberg and Production Manager Chris Whiteside. These two actors-turned-administrators are the production powerhouse behind Kayenta’s whiplashing fifty events per year average. Broberg and Whiteside star in Woolf alongside regional favorites Dean Jones (Rothko in Kayenta’s Red, Horton in Seussical) and Sceri Sioux Ivers (Corie from Barefoot in the Park and Diedre in I Hate Hamlet).
Gilyard, who coaches his cast with the kind of fervor you see on a football field, points them at every possible turn toward real behavior. “What are you afraid of? Why are you afraid to see this play?” asked Gilyard mid-rehearsal, in a discussion about why people may not want to see the show. “Is it a reason or an excuse? It is a healing play to those who are open to it. You can’t heal unless you acknowledge the pain. You can’t heal without scabs, and medicine, and side effects. People experience the impact of all the unfinished, unanswerable things in their lives on this thing called marriage.”
The content of the play merits a 17+ age suggestion on Center For the Arts at Kayenta’s website (below) and includes drinking, smoking, profanity, intimacy, and intimate language.
Dates: March 25-28 THU-SUN; March 31-April 4 WED-SUN
Time: 7:30pm except 6pm SUN (28th)
Location: Center for the Arts at Kayenta, 881 Coyote Gulch Court, Ivins, Utah 84738
Cost: $35 ($10 students with current ID or children)
Buy Tickets Online: KayentaArts.com
Call for Tickets: (435) 674-ARTS (2787)
Box Office Hours: M-F 12-4 PM
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