"A DELICATE BALANCE"
The American Century Theater
Arlington, VA (703) 553-8782
July 8-August 1
reviewed by David Sobelsohn
A Great Play, a Flawed Production
"We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each
other."--Jerry, in Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story" (1958)
"I don't think you should frighten an audience, I think you should terrify
them."--Edward Albee
One of the great plays of the 20th century, Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance"
(1966) is intelligent, funny, intense, frightening, moving, and ultimately tragic. It
tackles some of life's profound issues: the meaning of love, friendship, home, and family;
responsibility to others; the
respective roles of men and women; and above all, the fragility of any status quo--the
"delicate balance" to which the title refers.
But "A Delicate Balance" also poses formidable challenges. Symbolic and
elliptical, the play suffers from stilted, formal dialogue the New Republic's Robert
Brustein once derided as "as far from modern [human] speech as the whistles of a
dolphin." Add in Albee's insistence on personal approval of casting and other
staffing decisions, and one can understand why "A Delicate Balance" reaches the
professional stage so seldom.
Infrequent staging of this first and best of Albee's three Pulitzer Prize-winning plays
(he also won for "Seascape" (1975) and "Three Tall Women" (1994))
helps explain why The American Century Theater (TACT)--which specializes in neglected
American masterpieces--chose "A Delicate Balance" to close its 1997-98 season.
An additional explanation may lie in the play's principal theme. Despite its charter,
never before has TACT produced a play by Albee or any of American theater's other masters.
No O'Neill; no Arthur Miller; no Tennessee Williams. Artistic
director Jack Marshall must have thought a play about the threat of change would provide
the ideal vehicle for TACT's first encounter with one of America's theatrical giants.
In Albee's play, change threatens the lead characters, Agnes (Maura McGinn) and Tobias
(Joe Jenckes), when their very best friends, friends for forty years, Harry (Joe Schubert)
and Edna (Marilyn Bennett), arrive one evening, unannounced. In Agnes and Tobias's living
room, as Edna
sobs, she and Harry explain "[W]e were sitting home . . . all alone . . . [and] WE
GOT FRIGHTENED. . . . There was nothing . . . but we were very scared." The next day
Edna and Harry make clear their plans to move in permanently. "This is what you have
meant by friendship," asks Edna, rhetorically, "is it not?" Agnes and
Tobias's household also includes Agnes's sister Claire, a self-labelled "drunk"
(Rena Cherry Brown); their thirty-something daughter Julia, fleeing the breakup of her
fourth marriage (Amy McWilliams); and various unseen servants.
TACT's production of "A Delicate Balance" features some solid performances.
Brown steals most of her scenes, occasionally mugging but always entertaining, chewing a
meaty role with obvious relish. Jenckes makes a distinguished Tobias: stable, subdued, but
capable of passion under stress, a man with an increasingly desperate awareness of the
shallowness of his life and his relationships with others.
Regrettably, however, TACT's "A Delicate Balance" proves problematic on several
levels. Peter Finkel's set, deep red floral with two hideous black-and-white striped easy
chairs, seems neither elegant nor tasteful enough for people as wealthy as Tobias and
Agnes. At least on the first
weekend, the cast had problems with timing, pacing, and even some of the dialogue
(examples: McGinn said "we decide" instead of "we follow"; Jenckes
referred to "stupid Monday" instead of "stupid Sunday"; Brown
mispronounced the name of Tobias's favorite composer, Anton Bruckner).
The appearance of some of the cast doesn't help: McGinn can't convince us she gave birth
to the barely younger, much shorter McWilliams; the squat McWilliams's description of her
"angular adolescence" doesn't ring true; Brown hardly looks like she's spent 30
years drinking herself half to death.
Most disappointing of all is Gloria Dugan's direction. Dugan presumably bears part of the
blame for the cast's timing and pacing problems. She's also slighted the little things
that make a play believable: Jenckes refers to a copy of the always-morning New York Times
as the "afternoon
paper"; Bennett fells McWilliams with a slap in the face that wouldn't faze a
ten-year-old. More seriously, Dugan has stripped much of the play's mystery and subtlety.
Her Harry and Edna make no pretense of a routine visit: they arrive clinging together,
obviously terrified, so that when Agnes questions them she seems brutish rather than just
insensitive. Claire reminds Tobias of an ancient marital infidelity, but where Albee's
script deliberately leaves Tobias's lover's identity unclear, Dugan's Claire practically
tells us who she was. Albee calls for the women to hear the last few lines of a key
conversation between Tobias and Harry; Dugan's women stay out of the room until the end,
when on cue they tumble in like clowns falling through a suddenly opened door.
The American Century's black box theater provides a wonderfully intimate space to see this
greatest of plays by one of America's best playwrights. Too bad the production falls
short. Let's hope TACT deals with change better than Agnes and Tobias: its next production
by a major American playwright, Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," opens TACT's
1998-99 season on
September 23.
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