Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a play that is the emotional equivalent of being pulled behind a pickup truck in a shopping cart. It’s rough, and a bit unrelenting. But it’s also a hell of a ride you’ll be talking about to your friends.

The production mounted at The Performance Network does great service to the Edward Albee classic, considered by most scholars as a work that changed American theatre when it debuted 53 years ago.

The play centers on one long night of boozy interactions between George (John Seibert), a history professor at a small college, and his wife Martha (Sandra Birch) who is the daughter of the college President. They have invited a younger couple, biology professor Nick (Nick Yocum) and his wife Honey (Victoria Walters Gilbert) over to their house for drinks after a college function. The fact that they are coming over at 2 a.m. foretells trouble. There’s an old saying among college sports coaches talking about managing their players that “nothing good happens after midnight.”

George and Martha are like caged tigers who have been in captivity too long and have had brain events making them irascible, a bit unbalanced and utterly dependent on liquor to get from one hour to the next. George and Martha enter seeming like new zoo interns with buckets of meat who haven’t been warned that their hosts are not docile from the years behind bars, but rather bilious and bloody-minded.

If that were the end of it, it wouldn’t be much of a play. But both couples have dark secrets and lies they live, tell one another and to the world. And especially in the case of George and Martha, through all the apparent and outward hatred and hostility, there are truths about their hearts that can and do triumph over their booze soaked heads. And in that, audience members can probably, almost certainly, find truths in their own lives and relationships that can be difficult to recognize or own up to. That’s what made “Woolf” a breakthrough play–that and the ability of Albee to give you plenty to laugh about across three acts as you are witnessing the carnage of two relationships. The writing is nothing short of brilliant.

Birch strikes a marvelous balance with Martha, making her both loathsome and sad, yet amusing and just enticing enough to make you aware of why she was attractive to George in the first place and how she gets away with being convincingly randy in her cups. Seibert’s George is both henpecked and sad, defeated in so many ways, yet he is the one who delivers the sharpest dialogue and retorts, and never lets the audience forget he is the Papa lion and knows how to manage Martha’s antics and evade her claws from fatal cuts to his heart.

Nick Yocum achieves with great skill the transition he must make in the play from innocent stag who ventured into the cage to survivor. Victoria Walters Gilbert doesn’t have a lot to do in the play, but what she does get to do is right on character. She is the fawn in the cage, but we can see early on that she may have more in common with Martha than she knows or is willing to admit, and she delivers on her role in every way.

Jennifer Maiseloff’s set design and props deliver perfectly the look of a college professor’s home of an indeterminate year, though it is meant to be early 1960s. The furnishings look inherited rather than bought, lived in rather than created for happiness.

At almost three hours—a three-act play with two intermissions–the extremely talky play is a feat for the actors, especially Seibert’s George who has numerous difficult streams of dialogue to master. But the foursome play it tight and are on the beam for the entire evening.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is one of the best-written plays of the 20th century, and established Albee as one of that century’s most important playwrights along with Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. The Performance Network’s production does this masterwork proud.

Bottom Line: The Performance Network makes “Virginia Woolf “ a must-see for those who value the great plays.