The comings and goings of the Bloomsbury group, an English literary clique, has provided fodder for a slew of biographies and all manner of adaptations; covering the group and even its most subsidiary members has been a cottage industry for quite a long time. At the group’s center was Virginia Woolf, one of the finest of all writers, and one of its subsidiary characters was Vita Sackville-West, an aristocrat, a writer of poems and stories, and a passionate lover and friend to Woolf for the twenty years they knew each other. In the early nineties, Eileen Atkins put together an evening out of their letters to each other, and played in it opposite Vanessa Redgrave. The No Frills Company can’t offer that kind of star power, but it does bring us Kathleen Chalfant and Patricia Elliott, two of our best theater actresses, in a delicate, rarified pas de deux that chronicles the women’s complex relationship to each other.
Chalfant is also appearing in Playwright’s Horizon’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” so that she’s doing double duty on Monday nights for “Vita and Virginia.” You’d never know it from her laser focus: she beautifully captures Woolf’s too-sensitive-for-this-world nature, and also emphasizes her strength and humor as a literary power broker. Elliott, clad in red velvet, cannily delineates Vita’s very different kind of strength, which includes a lustful appreciation of sexuality that the mandarin Virginia cannot really share. Vita praises Virginia’s work constantly, as well she should, and Virginia takes this praise with relief, not for itself, but as a validation of her own attractiveness to her lover. Chalfant is at her best whenever she has to react to Vita crossing a line into vulgarity, especially when Vita shamelessly describes a trip to Hollywood and a meeting with Gary Cooper. These were extremely different women, but opposites attract, and Chalfant and Elliott make you feel their peculiar chemistry, which led to Woolf writing “Orlando” for Vita, not her best book by any means, but a charming testament to their love affair. This is a reading of the Atkins play, and it can get a bit static during gossip about the Sitwells, or recaps of party conversation. The play rather bewilderingly skips from the publication of “Orlando” to the beginning of World War Two. But by and large it is a worthwhile evening enlivened by two fine actresses working at their best level.
