"magnificent...sensitive and dynamic"

July 18, 2003 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

The dialog of Vita and Virginia now playing at Shakespeare & Co.'s Spring Lawn Theatre is magnificent. It was written by two of the most celebrated and successful novelists of the literary period we now call Modernism, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.

Every word in the two character play starring Catherine Taylor-Williams as Vita and Tod Randolph as Virginia has been skillfully gleaned by author Eileen Watkins from the letters, diaries and at times the publications of the two women. They met in 1922 at a Bloomsbury party; their literary and eventually physically intimate relationship, lasted almost twenty years.

Under director Dan McCleary's sensitive and dynamic direction, these two women emerge with a fiery intensity that begins with that casual meeting at which each woman sensed something in the other she needed and wanted. Vita, although a successful novelist, knew Virginia was the superior stylist; Virginia sensed a fascinating liberated sapphist with whom she felt shy and virginal but in whom she intuited a woman who could minister to the child-Virginia who needed love.

Their intense and passionate union is played out at Spring Lawn in a simple but remarkable setting with walls lined by great floral gardens painted on scrims, with giant scrims of mountains hanging over the stage, and with one simple small scrim that is used only once to great effect.

Although the play begins with Vita making the first move in a letter to Virginia offering her membership in PEN (and Virginia coyly declining but suggesting Vita write something for the Hogath Press Virginia and her husband ran) the play is never a static exchange of letters.

The two women act and interact constantly, circling each other with subtle skill. Their very costumes come into play. Vita's vibrantly colorful ones contrasting with Virginia's dowdily conservative ones-and then both being linked when Vita playfully throws an elaborate Persian shawl over Virginia's head.

The "mating dance," delayed by Virginia's hesitancy and frequent illnesses, progresses through the bestowal of puppies, the exchange and dedication of manuscripts, the visits to each other's homes. It is only after almost three years that just before Vita leaves England to join her husband in Persia that they spend their first night together.

By Act II, the relationship is strained by Virginia's jealousies of Vita's other loves. But it is also strengthened by Virginia's longest love letter to Vita - the writing of the novel Orlando in 1928, openly based on the character of Vita.

In the book, Virginia glorifies her hero/heroine but punishes him/her as well, killing Orlando at the end of the book. But it is a love letter. And Vita joyfully accepted it as such.

However, the two drifted apart in the years following and were only brought together again by the shared intimacy of the terrors and losses of WWII. It is in these scenes that the two actresses show their greatest skill and flexibility expressing with tenderness and understanding their love and their grief.

Virginia's suicide, although we know it is inevitable, is staged so imaginatively and poignantly that it breaks the heart.

The play ends with Vita including in a book of poems she and her husband are editing, a final tribute to Virginia, but one that calls attention to their unique love as well. It is a quote from Orlando that Virginia had written as prose, but, as is so much of her glorious prose, it is poetry as well. Set by Vita as a poem, it reads:

Let us go, then, exploring
This summer morning,
When all are adoring
The plum-blossom and bee.
And humming and hawing
Let us ask the starling
What he may think
On the brink
Of the dust-bin whence he picks
Among the sticks
Combings of scullion's hair.
What's life, we ask;
Life, Life, Life! cries the bird
As if he had heard...

Vita knew her Virginia and the classical education that had included Greek and Latin. When Virginia was half-mad she heard nightingales singing in Greek. And Vita knew that in Latin that bird was crying Vita, Vita, Vita! What greater tribute could Virginia bring to their long relationship?

This is a moving play, beautifully acted and played with a rapid fire urgency. You may have your own conception of the characters, especially that of Virginia, in our time more famous that Vita, but these two actresses inhabit their roles with their conceptions in a fascinating way that is bound to excite your interest and admiration. Go.