What's scarier than a play about boozed-up brainiacs wielding the wicked power of words? Two of them

Who's afraid of boozed-up academics bickering about everything from politics to land acknowledgments? How about language and its capacity to maim? And what about Virginia Woolf?

If you felt a shiver go down your spine, then know: two fantastically frightening productions are opening in Toronto. 

Lauded as the third-best play of all time by Time Out magazine, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a classic for good reason. Written in 1962 by Edward Albee, the play follows two couples in the aftermath of a university faculty soirée. Over approximately three hours, it becomes abundantly clear that something's not right between hosts Martha and George, who can't help but denigrate each other in front of their guests as they drink.

Albee's controversial masterwork begins previews at Canadian Stage on Jan. 18, featuring performances from real-life couples Paul Gross and Martha Burns and Hailey Gillis and Mac Fyfe.

Meanwhile, down the street at Crow's Theatre, a new play promises to pick up where Albee left off, with its own examination of love, academia and language. Liz Appel's Wights is now in previews, and treads a familiar premise, in which two brainy couples share drinks and bicker. Wights isn't a direct adaptation of Woolf, but the plays converse with each other across time, painting a frightening portrait of the American intelligentsia. 

Producing a 'masterpiece' for a new audience

Brendan Healy, artistic director of Canadian Stage and director of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, says that digging into Albee's play has been immensely fulfilling.

"It's such an incredible play," he tells CBC Arts. "You have a vague awareness that something is a masterpiece, but it can be a bit elusive until you start to work on it. Then you realize just how masterful it is in the rehearsal room."

Healy says he's always known that a successful production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would have to be "all about the actors." And looking at Canadian Stage's cast list, that emphasis is clear, with four beloved Canadian actors acting opposite their respective spouses (TV fans might recognize Gross and Burns from the cult series Slings & Arrows).

"I've had a longstanding fascination with the play and Albee as a writer," says Healy. "Once I thought of Paul and Martha, it just felt like the right fit … When I realized we had cast a married couple, I wanted to try and do that again for the characters Honey and Nick. Hailey and Mac just felt so right for it.

"The comfort and intimacy that exists between these couples are a huge advantage to the production," he continues. 

What might be surprising for audiences who know Albee's play is Healy's description of the work as "a great love story." The playwright was known to push his characters to their limits, often at the expense of their significant others — as in his equally controversial The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

Even so, "it's a love story," insists Healy. "It's about people who are deeply, deeply in love with one another, and that's what makes the play so powerful, and essentially, tragic. I knew that theoretically before stepping into this work, but living with the play now, I feel like it's absolutely a love story — one of the great romances of our stage."

Inside the complex world of Wights

Further east, Crow's Theatre is having similarly high-stakes conversations with Wights. The social satire is set on Halloween, just days before the recent U.S. election and on the eve of a big job interview at Yale University. Advertised as "Albee meets Jordan Peele," Wights goes in unexpected, even supernatural directions.

Originally from Toronto, playwright Liz Appel studied at prestigious institutions around the world, including Yale and Cambridge. Wights references her experiences in academia while simultaneously interrogating the relationship between language and power.

"It's interesting how Wights lines up with the election and the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump," says Wights director Chris Abraham, who also serves as Crow's artistic director. "There's been a lot going on at U.S. college campuses over the last year — and there always has been. That's been a big part of our dialogue around the play."

First commissioned in 2022, the play has had to evolve to keep up with shifting political discourses. "Times have changed," says Appel. The version of the script now playing at Crow's, for example, alludes to the recent string of protest encampments at university campuses across North America (as well as the responses from administration and law enforcement).

"One thing I was curious about was how the Ivy League fits into the political imaginary, both in the U.S. and here in Canada," says Appel. "There's a changing symbolism around what something like Yale means. It can pump out all these Republican leaders, and in a lot of ways, it's become a huge villain. J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School."

Wights isn't afraid of big ideas, and as its characters argue about everything from race to land acknowledgments, Appel's script always returns to language and its capacity to do harm. From Appel's perspective, humans ignore the power of language at our peril. And in Wights, audiences are trusted to keep up with the flashbang of ideas being hurled across the stage.

The more we take for granted the idea that language is neutral, the more we scrub everything of context all the time.- Liz Appel, playwright

"You want people to feel as smart as the play is," says Abraham. "Something I've noticed in theatre is that the audience is generally pretty eager to play whatever part you cast them in. So if you imagine them as getting it, they're going to get it. They'll find themselves understanding everything. They'll be the audience you want them to be. That's true of Shakespeare as well. The audience exists within the space you've created for them."

In Wights, that space is one of extreme precision, in which every word carries enormous heft.

"Language is a force," says Appel. "It's a scrubbing force. It makes things apparent and erases things. There's a huge political implication to that — with life-and-death ramifications.

"The more we take for granted the idea that language is neutral, the more we scrub everything of context all the time. That's incredibly destructive," she continues. "Somehow, people think of language as outside of action. And I think that's a mistake."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? runs Jan. 18 to Feb. 9 at Canadian Stage in Toronto. Wights plays through Feb. 9 at Crow's Theatre, also in Toronto.