This revival of Albee’s 1966 Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, A Delicate Balance, is noteworthy for many reasons, beginning with its superb cast, who handle the playwright’s tart, literary dialogue with seemingly effortless ease and skill. They also deliver performances that breathe vigorous life into characters that border on caricature.
The director, Robin Larsen, must also be praised for the way she has orchestrated Albee’s surrealistic story, controlled its excesses and given it an internal rhythm that underlines and propels the action in admirable fashion. Kudos, too, must go to Tom Buderwitz for his evocative suburban set. A Delicate Balance, despite its Pulitzer, has always had its detractors. John Simon, for example, charged that “Albee does not write about people: he writes about humanoid constructs of his agenda-addled brain.” Another critic, Charles Marowitz, wrote the play off as being a “tepid” piece of work. I have to disagree with those assessments, if only because, despite my resistance to it at first, the play slowly but steadily got under my skin and stayed with me long after it ended.
A family play about upper-class WASPs, Balance presents Tobias (David Selby) and Agnes (Susan Sullivan), the parents, and Claire (O-Lan Jones), the latter’s alcoholic, wise-cracking sister. Julia (Debora Puette) is the black sheep of the family, a 36-year-old who returns to the nest whenever one of her many marriages breaks up.
Lily Knight and Mark Costello play Edna and Harry, friends who move in with them when a sudden “fear” seizes them, thereby upsetting the so-called balance of this decidedly unhinged group.
Albee posits these important but unanswered questions: Am I my sister’s keeper? Are we our daughter’s keeper? Are we our neighbor’s keeper? Are we equipped to handle people with mental breakdowns? The play, in the end, is not only about relationships in a dysfunctional family but also about the limits of friendship and love.
In a theatrical device of repetition and reversal, Albee concludes by repeating Agnes’ speech from the beginning of the play in which she muses about her incipient madness. Her rhapsody of words serves as a bizarre denouement to this drama of demented treachery within a hard-drinking oddball family.
