A Delicate Balance is an unusually slow moving play for Edward Albee; the story is slight and the dramatic movement
mostly internal. I seem to see it once every twenty years, more or less, and
having just seen the new revival, I can be content for yet another twenty
before getting another fix—but it is full to brimming with the author’s
usual razor-sharp dialogue and theoretically (we’ll get back to
that) provides meaty material out of which several stellar performers can make
a relatively satisfying
meal…satisfying, at least, for the audience members who can remain attentive
through nearly three hours of little more than pouring drinks and making
conversation.
The
play is about a dysfunctional upper crust WASP family. It contains no topical references,
nor even any vernacular that seems particularly dated, so, thirty years af- ter
its original production, the program can still cite the time and place as
"A well-appointed suburban house. Now." And you don't even blink.
The
quality of dysfunction that makes this family so different from other
dysfunctional stage families is an almost relentless
self-knowledge. Cool, cutting patriarch Agnes (Glennn Close)
knows full well that she is a creature of limited compassion, and makes no
allowances for self-delusion. Her clinically despised sister Claire (Lindsay
Duncan) has an unsettlingly perceptive
view of her own chronic alcoholism. Only her husband Tobias (John
Lithgow) seems to be foggy when reality
checks are called for, or maybe he just hangs back to preserve the delicate
balance of the household.
The
first thing threatening to shatter that balance is the sudden appearance of
Agnes and Tobias' oldest and best friends of forty years' standing, Edna (Clare
Higgins) and Harry (Bob
Balaban). They were alone in their house,
they say, and suddenly, in- explicably, became frightened. And needed to escape
the loneliness and terror and go where they would be wanted. To their friends.
What they don't make quite clear, and only emerges later, is that they intend
to move in.
This
issue is brought to a boil by the appearance of Agnes and Tobias' daughter
Julia (Martha Plimpton), who has
arrived for comfort and succor, as she al- ways does, whenever she leaves a
husband. (She has just left #4, prompting Claire to dub her a "quadruple
amputee.") Raising an interesting issue: does the spoiled, adult daughter
have claim to her old room; or do the sudden unannounced guests have the
inalienable right to co-opt it?
The
living room bar is never closed,
the booze flows at all hours, and the dialogue is pithy. and arch nearly to the
point of exhaustion.
Full
disclosure: Most (though not quite all) of what I wrote above was cribbed from
my 1996 review of the last revival,
since that portion is about the text of the play, which hasn’t changed. But
following those words, I also wrote these; and in re-reading, I tripped over
them:
The
odd thing about the play is that it seems to have one foot in some fantasy
realm—this family is so catty, so bitchy, so quick to devastatingly quip,
that they don't seem like a "real" family at all. (More on that
later, though.) On the other hand, the dysfunction is so recognizable, the
issues raised so potent, and the characterization and dramatic ground rules so
consistent, that you find yourself accepting the rarefied universe in which
this family seems to exist anyway.
I
simply couldn’t apply them or anything like them to a review of the current
revival because this time around…I don’t believe it.
In
the last revival, directed by Gerald Guitierrez, the cast was so perfectly
pitched that there was a family cohesion. They sold you on the illusion that
you were watching people trapped in each other’s lives by dint of blood
relation; whatever familiarity breeds, it was there under everybody’s skin.
But
this time around, under the direction of Pam McKinnon—who would seem a fantastic idea on paper,
especially after her mind-blowingly great job helming the last revival of
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—the energies feel
disjointed. And with one exception, the characterizations seem more like
familiar tropes than family familiars. And this exposes the play in a light
that oh, it so should not ever be in;
because that light makes you more mindful of its mechanics.
I
acknowledge that there are many many who think of A Delicate Balance as Albee’s masterwork, and it did win him a Pulitzer.
So take with a grain of salt that I don’t, because I can’t, regard Albee
as a great American dramatist, but as a notable American dramatist who managed a few gripping early
plays off a verbal style that wouldn’t be out of place in the best noir pulps,
energy and white-heat instinct; and then declined, with ambiguity and
bitterness standing in for meaning and substance, because unlike those great old pulpsmiths, he doesn’t have the
compensating gift of story—he stops at situation. In detail, that’s a
position for examination in other reviews, other times (a few of which you may
find in these cyber-pages), but is relevant here to the degree that A
Delicate Balance builds toward a climax
that only holds its own if you’re not thinking about the performances. If you
maintain conscious regard of, say, Ms. Close’s studied aloofness, or Ms.
Plimpton’s energetic brattiness, you also perforce remain mindful of Albee’s smug
refusal to give the dramatic situation real definition, which obtains right
through what’s presented as the moment of truth for Tobias, in which he must
either definitively kick his friends out or open his house to them
indefinitely.
Why
John Lithgow alone is fully convincing here I’m not sure, but it may be because
Tobias is alone is not possessed by the language and propulsion of fury;
rather, he is bombarded by the rage and need of others and tries his best to
remain a quiet referee. But, even he, exposed, has a dark nature (this kind of
character is a specialty of Mr. Lithgow). And in the end, he delivers his
conflicted speech with such sweet despair, such desperate confusion, that in a
better production it would have been heart rending.
But
here, alas, it seems only the capper…the moment that exposes the play most
mercilessly because it’s a moment of merciless exposure for a character himself
without a spine…
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