A Review of 'Freshwater': Virginia Woolf's Only Play, Produced by the Women's Project

By Brittany Barker, Age 15

Inspired by the April '08 Journalism Workshop, "Between Ignorance and Curiosity," and originally published on Girls Write Blog

Can a play written 86 years ago to amuse a few friends, performed by a few other friends, and about some of their own friends and relatives of the previous generation make sense to a New York City crowd who knows nothing about any of them? It is evident that Virginia Woolf has many dimensions, and my own perception of her has changed after seeing her only play, Freshwater. The play shows her fun side.

On February 13, my mentor Josleen and I met up at the Julia Miles Theater (The Women’s Project) on West 55th Street to see a first-ever production of Freshwater. It was an intimate setting. The props looked homemade, like they would have been if the play were being done in someone’s living room. The actors sometimes spoke directly to the audience, and even winked like they were telling you an inside joke. At the end, they even interacted directly with the audience. 

At the beginning of the play, I was confused by the variety of personalities onstage. The actors dived right into their characters and briefly introduced themselves. It was almost as if Woolf zoomed in on one day in their lives. As the play progressed, I became more comfortable with the characters and with what was going on.

The play was filled with jokes that the audience seemed to get. Among the eccentric characters were Woolf’s great aunt, the famous photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, portrayed here as a ditzy lady who chased everyone around with a camera; her husband William Allingham, who was wanting to go to Egypt and who mooned the audience in the second act; the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who kept reading the same poem over and over again; the painter G.F. Watts, who couldn’t get over himself; and his wife, model Ellen Terry, who never got a chance to decide what she truly desired doing. She turned out to be the main character because by the play’s end, she had changed the most. My mentor told me that Terry became a famous actress in London.

Although I couldn’t quite grasp everything, Woolf was brilliant in compacting these multiple personalities into one theatrical feature. The play’s ending was funny. The actors made the audience stand up, and everyone had to sing “God Save the Queen,” which is the same tune as “My Country Tis of Thee” in the USA. I learned that this was the way plays always ended in England.

I wonder what Woolf’s reaction would have been to having her play produced for a large audience in New York in 2009. Would she have been happy and excited, or would she have thought of it as an invasion of her private life?

Ultimately, it was a foreign experience for me because it was only my third time attending an off-Broadway play. It’s said that Virginia Woolf pioneered new styles of writing that continue to inspire young writers today. She remains inspirational and iconic to those of us who are willing to break the rules and embrace the possibilities.

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