STAGE REVIEW : A Visit to the Mind, Spirit of Woolf

There is nothing indirect about “A Room of One’s Own,” which opened Tuesday at the Westwood Playhouse. This sobering one-woman show does just what it announces: It reproduces writer Virginia Woolf giving a lecture before an audience of women at Cambridge University in 1928, that takes as its subject “Women and Fiction.”

Simple and straightforward, yes. But loaded. Women and fiction how? The fiction they write or the fiction that is written about them, asks Woolf, who has had time, as she explains, to ponder the question. The upshot is a fascinating journey through a reasoned (and, in life, often troubled) mind that takes up both aspects of the statement and several more. It goes on rightly, if circuitously, to deduce that, if women are to be able to write fiction at all, they must have 500 a year and, yes, a room of their own in which to do it.

Now you see where the whole thing is going--to our very doorstep, 63 years later.

As any Woolf aficionado knows, “A Room of One’s Own,” later published as a book and still a favorite, is an intrinsic part of English literature and any feminist manifesto. Its witty arguments in favor of the rights of women (the circuitous part), especially the central argument of economic independence with which to purchase those rights, is the hard currency of today’s thinking.

As given breath, a bloodstream and a pulse on stage by actress Eileen Atkins, “A Room of One’s Own” becomes living flesh. Tall, angular and lean, Atkins makes no attempt, beyond the functional English dress and practical rain hat she wears as she enters, to impersonate the British novelist. It is far more a case of psychological habitation: the taking on of potently expressed ideas that have the transforming power of communicating the essence of the person who first dreamed them up.

The result is an actionless, meandering yet thoroughly involving visit with a cleverly designing mind. Woolf’s mix of supposition, humorous logic and rationale take us caustically through Jane Austen and Bronte sisters territory, with a nod to George Eliot and lots of delicious digs at the closed society of Cambridge University itself, where all privilege, including that of walking on the grass, admission to the library and access to alcohol and other gastronomic treats were oddly and uncontestedly male. At least in 1928.

Seen through the charismatic prism of time and Woolf’s intentional, tongue-in cheek representations, these semi-serious salvos are all the more remarkable for having been expressed when they were neither popular nor common.

Behind the discursive reflections are the withering possibilities. Surely, in this man’s world, Cleopatra must have “had a way with her,” and surely it would be safe to assume that Lady Macbeth “had a will of her own.” But most entertaining of all is Woolf’s inspired tour of a singular, mad presumption: that, at a time when women who refused to do their parents’ bidding and marry according to their choice were “beaten, locked up and flung about the room,” Shakespeare might have had a sister who had the audacity to want to write plays.

Given the myriad impediments to creative achievement--the economic disenfranchisement and long list of slavish domestic duties exacted of women in those days--it would have been amazing if this “sister” could have come out of it at all. Of course, she doesn’t.

Such are the bantering delights of this almost entirely cerebral evening. It requires a few simple attributes, such as an inquisitive mind and an attention span of longer than 15 minutes. But for the intellect with a taste for subtle acting, smart words and a sharp wit, the pleasures are abundant.

Atkins will not compromise. She understands that to make no concessions is the way to hold on to the integrity and stature of her performance. Encouraged by director Patrick Garland (who also did this faithful adaptation), she plays it straight from the hip, without artifice or embellishment, pursing the lips into a tight little knot when making an especially cogent point or throwing the bobbed hair back with a shrug when discarding a particularly troublesome idea. It is a performance as unencumbered and clear as the issues it explores.

Ultimately, “A Room of One’s Own” the play, like “A Room of One’s Own” the book, celebrates the one thing we all possess: the inviolable freedom of the mind, the only region of our being to which we exclusively hold the key. It may seem a simplistic conclusion to reach, but Atkins and Woolf make getting there a journey to savor.

* “A Room of One’s Own,” Westwood Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Nov. 17. $27.50-$30; (213) 208-5454. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.