Virginia Woolf Gets Silly in 'New' Play

Off-Broadway troupe revives author's one satirical work
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 25, 2009 8:03 PM CST
Virginia Woolf Gets Silly in 'New' Play
An ad for the first professional production of Virginia Woolf's only play.   (Women's Project)

A satirical play by Virginia Woolf received its professional premiere today in New York, NPR reports. Featuring figures like poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and painter George Frederic Watts, Freshwater lampoons "high-falutin', oldish, long-bearded Victorians," the play's producer said. Woolf wrote the hour-long farce as a fun project for her free-spirited, Bloomsbury circle friends.

"It burned my hands, because I started leafing through it and the language just popped off the page," director Anne Bogart said. "The idea of Virginia Woolf writing a play for her family to perform for their friends is so full of the exuberance of theater in the first place—the amateur spirit that actually makes theater happen." (More Virginia Woolf stories.)

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