Posted: Sun., Jan. 25, 2009, 5:00pm PT

Off Broadway

Freshwater

(Women's Project; 199 seats; $42 top)

By Marilyn Stasio

'Freshwater'

A Women's Project and SITI Company presentation of a play in one act by Virginia Woolf. Directed by Anne Bogart. 

Mary Magdalene - Akiko Aizawa Lt. John Craig -  Gian Murray Gianino Julia Margaret Cameron - Ellen Lauren Charles Hay Cameron - Tom Nelis George Frederick Watts - Barney O'Hanlon Alfred Lord Tennyson - Stephen Duff Webber Ellen Terry - Kelly Maurer

You really had to be there -- at a country house in 1935, when the era's Olympian elites, the Bloomsbury group, performed Virginia Woolf's one and only play, "Freshwater," for their private amusement. Delivered in the broad style of an English music-hall entertainment, this comic spoof sends up an earlier clique of literary swells, the cool late-Victorian crowd who hung out at photographer Julia Margaret Cameron's house on the Isle of Wight. While helmer Anne Bogart deftly conveys the sophomoric glee behind the original giddy enterprise, the over-bright and over-brash production puts a certain Yankee spin on the Brits' intellectual antics.

The world of English art and letters was cozy and compact in 1923, when Woolf wrote this satire, as it was in 1935 when she revised the work for its one-time-only performance. Everyone not only knew everyone else (and in some cases was sleeping with everyone else), they also knew their elders. All this made it unnecessary for Woolf to waste much effort on such pedestrian matters as exposition.

Less au courant American auds will surely appreciate the director's note, explaining that Woolf wrote the mistress-of-the-manor role of Cameron for her sister, Vanessa Bell. Scribe's husband, Leonard, took the part of Cameron's husband, philosopher Charles Hay Cameron. Her niece, Angelica Bell, had the fun of playing the great actress Ellen Terry when she was a girl of 17, the model and recent bride of allegorical painter George Frederick Watts.

Watts, who was some 30 years older than his young wife, was played by Woolf's brother-in-law, the mural painter Duncan Grant. Woolf cast her brother Adrian Bell as the stuffiest figure in the piece, esteemed poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who lived next door to the Camerons.

There is no mention in the program note about who played Queen Victoria, who appears at the end of the show as regina ex machina to hand out fete prizes (a peerage for Tennyson, the Order of Merit for Watts). In Bogart's treatment, the short, rotund queen is played by a tall, lanky man (also uncredited) in a handsome black mourning dress.

All of James Schuette's costumes are well defined and beautifully detailed, which is a real help because they indicate so much of what we need to know about the caricatured Victorian celebs in this piece. Both Schuette and the sound designer fall down on the setting, though, which is supposed to represent the home and gardens of Dimbola, the Camerons' country estate. The plain, white room is functional without being charming, and the outdoor noises mingling with the giggles of the amateur players behind the homemade stage curtain have a barnyard ambience.

As a family relation of Julia Margaret Cameron (played with cruelly funny verve here by Ellen Lauren), Woolf must have observed and been amused by the personal idiosyncrasies of her famous cousin and her equally celebrated guests. Snide laughter is directed at household hygiene routines (Tom Nelis has fun showing us how much Cameron, the esteemed philosopher, hated to have his hair washed), as well as the couple's insistence on taking their coffins with them on a trip to India.

But Woolf takes her best shots at the artistic complacency and ideological rigidity of her Victorian elders. Watts (Barney O'Hanlon), whose mannered allegorical studies would make anyone giggle, is heard agonizing over "the great toe of Mammon," which has consumed months and months of effort. Tennyson (Stephen Duff Webber), who has a habit of speaking in poetic circumlocutions, complains of the admiring hordes who have taken over his own home ("the son of man has nowhere to lay his head"), but never misses a chance to quote from his own work.

Because the piece was written for private consumption, it wasn't Woolf's job to make its topical references relevant to a modern aud. Unfortunately, neither Bogart nor dramaturg Megan E. Carter has done much in that department, either.

What the helmer has done, though, is direct our focus to Terry, whose intelligence and impatience come through nicely in Kelly Maurer's clean, unaffected perf. With all around her acting like asses, this clever young thing sizes up the situation and walks out on her stodgy old husband, his boring friends and all their fusty, suffocating notions of art and life. No doubt Woolf and her lively set felt exactly the same way.

Sets and costumes, James Schuette; lighting, Brian H. Scott; sound, Darron L. West; hair and wigs, Anne Ford-Coates; dramaturg, Megan E. Carter; production stage manager, Elizabeth Moreau. Opened Jan. 25, 2009. Reviewed Jan. 23. Running time: 1 HOUR, 15 MIN.