Saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway last week, great seats at a deep discount (who would have thought sixty bucks would ever seem like a bargain?). I think the enduring appeal of that play might be that married couples, who still make up a good portion of any theater audience, come out saying, “Well, maybe our marriage isn’t so bad after all!” The Longacre Theater does not offer booze at intermission and there were quite a few disappointed patrons at the first intermission, many of whom could have clearly used a stiff drink or two. Plenty of ersatz booze being belted back on stage, of course.

This production is indeed Kathleen Turner’s show. From her opening line (“God, what a dump!”) to her final answer to the question posed in the title, she rules what remains of that rundown roost George and Martha are doomed to inhabit. She looks like she has been in training for the role in years past, enjoying the pleasures life has to offer without frequent breaks for the gym, and her Martha has a blowsy quality that Liz Taylor’s lacked. (Besides, I could never understand how a woman who looked like Liz was doing languishing in nowheresville.) She owns the role and put Taylor out of my mind for the evening.

I wish I could say the same of Bill Irwin’s George. Though I liked the kinetic, almost Robin Williams quality of his jesting (seeing him trade bons mots with the hapless Nick was like watching McEnroe play tennis with the ball boy) and was won over by his abstract take on the disappointed, cuckolded “associate professor” (as Martha continuously reminds him) he let me down in the last act. That’s when you need George to turn around, to reveal that beneath the animosity is a deep well of concern for his wife — as Richard Burton does so convincingly in the film — and I wasn’t feeling it on Wednesday.

Maybe it was an off night, who knows? Wed is a matinee day and after going through that Walpurgisnacht twice the actors may be a bit spent (though Turner didn’t show it). The couple’s evening guests, Nick and Honey (played here by David Harbour and Mireille Enos) are rather hapless foils; though Enos makes the most of her role, milking it for the laughs the playwright built into it, I didn’t find Harbour sexy enough to raise the amount of steam that clouds the evening. All the great lines are in place (“But that’s all blood under the bridge”; “Georgie-porgie, put-upon-pie”) and the play stands up. But since Albee shocked Broadway with its first staging 44 years ago, a lot of people have copied his style; in how many final acts have you seen characters unmasked, forced to face their illusions, psychologically burned to the ground to face the harsh light of Truth?

The amazing thing about George and Martha is that they endure, even their marriage endures. Though Albee was about thirty when he wrote WAVW, it still seems like a young man’s play: fuck you, mom and dad! He even named them after the parents of our country. But as Nick and Honey learn the hard way, no one knows what really holds a marriage together except the two people bound to each other. It is a lesson for the young, and a humbling one.