Adapting a canonical work of theater is difficult for any company, let alone one tucked away in Iowa City’s bustling Pedestrian Mall, detached from the ample resources of Broadway. Yet Riverside Theatre will open its 2025 season with Edward Albee’s classic play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“It’s one of those plays every theater nerd reads in high school and thinks, ‘I wish I was doing this play right now,’” Adam Knight, director of the show, said.

Albee’s Tony-winning play was written in 1962 and is often cited as one of the major works of both playwriting and literature, making it a fitting choice to open the company’s next year of programming in the city of literature, Knight said.

The play is also set in the world of academia, following an embittered older couple, Martha and George, hosting a young professor and his wife, Nick and Honey, after a faculty party. Taking place entirely within the couple’s living room, the play is a psychological drama that examines love, gender dynamics, and reconciling with the past.

Riverside has predominantly programmed contemporary work in the past few years, a decision made to reflect the social and political climate, Knight said. But reaching into theater history and pondering its relevance was a factor in choosing “Virginia Woolf.”

“It’s about highly educated people struggling with big questions, like the role of the individual in a world that seems more ridiculous and tragic,” Knight said. “Those questions felt present today. They certainly haven’t lost their power.”

Part of the difficulty in adapting a play as famous as “Virginia Woolf” proved to be the preconceived notions of what it looks like. Knight had the entire story in his head before rehearsals began because of his familiarity with the script and film.

“Flushing away everything I thought it was to make it fresh for an audience was the goal,” Knight said. “To do that, you sit with the text and listen to it, really read it and feel it until it’s fresh, and we can make it our own.”

Preparedness is important, but Knight notes being open to the wiggle room provided by the rehearsal process and what the actors will bring is key. In fact, Knight’s favorite part of the process is running scenes and making changes depending on the feel.

On Sept. 4, a mere week away from the opening of the show, the cast and crew gathered at Riverside’s cozy black box stage for more tinkering. The house was clustered together, and the seats in which the audience would be swept away by the story of “Virginia Woolf” served as backpack storage and script displays.

Knight sat in the middle of the second row, a table beside him with a script open and ready for choreography rehearsal. While it might not seem obvious from the synopsis, there are quite a few physical altercations within “Virginia Woolf,” and fight choreographer Kevin Michael Moore was positioned to walk the cast through them.

Before the process could begin, stage manager Meenakshi Chinmai asked the actors to check in, to which they all responded “green,” except Devon Stone, who noted he had been nursing a migraine the past few days.

“It’s a good thing this is a whispering show,” Kristy Hartsgrove Mooers, who plays Martha, said.

Immediately, the actors and crew were receptive and understanding of Stone’s note and checked in several more times throughout the night. While gauging actor comfort is a part of any production, the frequency at which Chinmai or other members of the crew confirmed everyone was contented gestured to the intimate nature of the play.

In just one rehearsal, actors were thrown to the ground, pinned against walls, choked, and shoved. Because of the collaborative atmosphere, though, Knight and Moore were able to tinker with the finest details within every stunt.

During one scene, Martha entertains Nick and Honey on the couch by telling a long story and clearly getting some things off her chest. Meanwhile, George, played by Tim Budd, sneaks around the set with an umbrella-mechanized shotgun prop that had just recently been built.

Once queued through the dialogue, George aims at Martha, is spotted by Honey, who screams, and pulls the trigger, initiating a colorful umbrella canopy to burst open. It’s a practical joke played on Martha, but even this small interaction became the center of the workshop.

While Chinmai and assistant stage manager Miles Peterson reloaded the umbrella shotgun, Knight and Moore discussed timing with Budd. For a moment like this, making sure the audience has enough time to register each character’s reaction is important for the scene to deliver maximum impact.

For the next run, Budd aims the prop toward the chair Hartsgrove Mooers is sitting in, but this only kind of looks like he’s pointing at her, Moore said. Budd moved the shotgun slightly to his right.

“Now it looks like you’re shooting Honey,” Moore said.

The actors laughed before resetting to the start of the scene and running it once more, this time with streamlined physicality from Budd and an added beat in Hartsgrove Mooers’ delivery. When the scene completed, the actors express the natural feeling of this tweaked scene, and the crew decided to move on.

The back-and-forth communication between how actors feel within the scene and how the run-throughs play from the house sets a pace for the room. Much like how the dialogue shoots between characters in rapid succession in the play, actors and crew members are quick to check with each other about choices.

In one scene, which was so exhausting and long that only one full run-through was possible, George uses the full space of the set to deliver a monologue to Honey, played by Lauren Galliart. George’s story is full of repeated lines and phrases as other characters constantly interrupt to react, making timing all the more important to the actors.

“I’m ping-ponging everywhere,” Budd said. “It’s Albee’s writing – you tell these long stories and hear these little responses. Long story, little response, more long story, little response.”

Having the full range of the set to work with at this stage of rehearsal benefits instinctual choices. Several times throughout these long run-throughs, an actor would add a movement without consulting Knight first, only to find that it feels perfectly natural.

The set engulfs Riverside’s black box theater space, with a full wall and neatly designed living room; the house seems to blend into the scene. Part of the process of this rehearsal was making sure none of the set decorations blocked the preplanned choreography.

As Hartsgrove Mooers and Stone practiced an intimate scene against a wall, Knight repositioned himself among the house seats to make sure no couches or lamps obfuscated the view.

One way to practice these scenes, and to have enough time to check angles, was to deploy what the crew called water speed. In this mode, actors still speak their lines as they would normally, but their movement is slowed to more minutely detect how timing will line up with dialogue.

For most scenes, water speed was used for the initial run of a scene before playing it closer to a normal pace. Although, playing the script at normal speed still feels quick due to of the rapidity of Albee’s writing.

Albee was so particular about the intricacies of the story that anything other than a realistic production keeping close to the text has not been attempted. Knight said realism was key to Albee; the subtext of the writing relating to real-world topics was most readable through a realistic lens.

The estate upholds strict rules for casting, too, sticking predominantly to white actors without messing with the original interpretation, Knight said. In 2001, however, an all-Black cast performed a slightly altered version of “Virginia Woolf” at Howard University, a historically Black university, with the estate’s blessing.

This version has lived on in the decades since, and it still performs today, including a recent production this past summer at Portland Stage in Portland, Maine.

Once the choreography reached a satisfactory point, Moore took his leave from the stage after a round of applause from the actors, and intimacy choreographer Carrie Pozdol stepped in. The next portion of the rehearsal focused on the many scenes in which characters were physically intimate with each other.

Much like at any point in the process where actors were made to touch each other, Pozdol and the rest of the crew checked in with their comfort level. Due to the comfortable atmosphere, most of the scenes involved actors taking moments further rather than easing up.

In one scene where George chokes Martha from behind, the actors took the scene at water speed and planned out every hand placement and facial expression to deliver the hardest impact. To command the audience’s attention, Pozdol suggested Budd pound his fist into the sofa chair to punctuate the moment and draw eyes to the pair.

“I’m riveting – they’re already going to be looking at me,” Hartsgrove Mooers said.

No matter how intense the scene, actors remained playful and inquisitive, led by the calming guidance of Pozdol and Knight. By the end of the rehearsal, when pieces had been built and it was time to put them together, scenes flowed naturally without interruption.

The rehearsal process is not one audiences are frequently allowed to spectate, as much of it falls into minuscule adjustments that stack on top of each other to craft the show presented on opening night.

“The work only deepens after every run. As we’re now in the running and polishing stage, you stop thinking as much. There’s an ebb and flow that leads to a real alchemy of surprise and play emerging,” Knight said.

Audiences can discover the final product of the ever-evolving rehearsal process when Riverside’s production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opens on Sept. 12.