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Putting four down-and-dirty drunks together on a stage, as Edward Albee does in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is like lighting a match in a room full of dynamite – it creates an instantly dangerous environment. No one is playing by the rules.

“Everybody’s drunk before the play even starts,” said Sam Gregory, star of Paragon Theatre’s highly anticipated new staging at the Phoenix Theatre. “That’s a great tool Albee uses to get right down to the bone and into the marrow.”

But painful as it can be to watch some drunk make a fool of himself in public, watching a novice trying to convincingly portray inebriation on a stage can also send people stumbling – for a bar stool.

When it comes to playing drunk, some actors are cripplingly self-conscious. Others are outright hams. The mistakes are glaring: Slurring that’s too thick, the sudden inability to put two feet together, such total abandonment of subtlety you wonder if the character is drunk or injected with some debilitating chemical agent.

The sober truth about drunks? Most don’t want to be found out, so they act the opposite. All that might give them away is the odor, the slight weave, the slumped posture, the overemphasis on diction, the wild and involuntary fluctuation in volume.

“It’s an accumulation of small things that makes a huge difference, rather than trying to be big,” Paragon director Warren Sherrill said.

It’s trying not to be loud, but you’re shouting. Your mouth doesn’t quite work as it should. You listen hard but process things more slowly. Eyes strain to focus.

It’s creating a layer of fuzz.

Because the drunk tries at all costs to keep it together, he’s usually the last to know he’s failed.

The most common tip actors get on playing drunk is to play it sober. That’s what drunks do, said Martha Harmon Pardee, who plays Martha, “until you get to that point when you don’t give a (bleep) who’s watching you – and you should.”

But Gregory, who swigs 24 fake cocktails during the play, struggles with the simplicity of that advice. “Because oddly enough, as I go along, I can actually convince myself I’m getting a little high,” he said. “It’s a little bit like a contact high, where you can put your mind into a state of being slightly buzzed, and then you can play within that range.”

On the stage, as in life, everyone responds to alcohol – and the alcoholic – differently. There’s the drunk who drinks to maintain control. There is the crazy, sloppy drunk. There is the broad, drunk clown.

“Woolf” has four distinct drunks in its tank. Martha grows verbally and physically abusive. Pardee believes that Martha, as the spoiled and sloppy daughter of the university president, with no independent identity of her own, drinks “just to try to put the fire out.” George retreats into a kind of sideways, evasive passivity. Gregory sees his as a denser, darker drunk.

Their younger guests are out of their league. Honey goes from mousy to retching, Nick from flirty to fatigued. He has one of the play’s more revelatory lines: “After a while, you don’t get any drunker, do you?” Albee has said this line is a statement, not a question.

All four must find ways to convey the effects of alcohol to suit their unique characters.

Three key factors in that consideration: fatigue, time of day and personal histories. Each affects behaviors.

Slamming drinks at 2 p.m. produces a different kind of drunk than slamming drinks at 2 a.m., as George and Martha do here, after eight hours of drinking at a cocktail party. In that wee, small hour of the morning, the level of drunkenness ebbs and flows in the house like the tide.

“I think Martha is a professional drinker,” Pardee said. “I think she can drink all night and stay on her feet. But certainly, any filter she had has gone away. It just comes right out.”

Nonverbal communication

What makes playing a convincing drunk so much harder than, say, communicating anger or love? Because those are emotions, Gregory said. Drunkenness is a physical state, and much of its effects must be communicated nonverbally.

“It’s like if you have to trip onstage. Or sneeze,” Gregory said. “That’s really hard to do convincingly. For a long time, I had trouble simply laughing onstage, because that’s an action, not an emotion. An action is harder than rage or love.”

Barbra Andrews includes Honey’s drinking in her larger dissection of the character she plays. “It is another layer that must be authentic, absolutely believable and serve the story,” she said. How do you do that? “Find your fuzziness.”

Bottling authenticity

If a director staged “West Side Story,” he’d find ways to help his actors understand a real friend’s murder. But mining soddenness? A director can’t very well break open a bottle and yell “action” – can he?

Well, yes. Legendary tales abound about what in the biz they call a “drunk-through rehearsal” – and, in some cases, during performances. For years, Bryan Foster’s running gag at the Heritage Square Opera House was snatching and downing multiple shots, right out of patrons’ hands.

But that was for comic effect. The veteran director of a recent local drama set in a bar gathered his cast in the controlled environment of a warehouse. The goal: See if his actors could drink as much alcohol as is called for in the script, and still perform the play in the same time period. One actor downed three shots of Jameson whiskey in five minutes, followed quickly by “a number of huge, sweet Manhattans,” he said.

Though you’d think there might not be much retention from such rehearsals, “I’m pretty sure we all got something from it that carried over,” said the actor, whose job won’t let him reveal his name.

“But I think we all believed that night was as close to the way the show ought to go as we ever got.”

That could never happen in “Virginia Woolf,” Pardee said. Talk about diminishing returns.

“I can barely remember my lines as it is,” she said with a laugh. “I think if we actually played how drunk and tired we’d be, I would be laid out on the floor. The play would be six hours long.

“What was it that Olivier said to Hoffman (while filming) ‘Marathon Man’? ‘Why not try acting, dear boy?”‘

Then again, the late Archie Smith, the Denver Center’s artist emeritus, had a different take. He often advised students: “Always play everything a little drunk.”

Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.

How drunk are they?

The New York Times enlisted two experts – a liver specialist and a bartender – to examine just how much the “Virginia Woolf” characters ingest. Their findings: