Edward Albee brought us A Delicate Balance four years not quite to the day after his globe-startling Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – with Ballad of the Sad Café and Tiny Alice making few long-range impressions in between.
With the new three-acter, the often-self-impressed playwright regained his foothold on a ranking with the most substantial 20th-century playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and the too frequently overlooked George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart team.
Titling the new drama as he did, he knew what he was up to. At its best and most challenging, A Delicate Balance is an uncommonly delicate work, which by virtue of the story it tells – the situations it presents – requires a director to find a balance among vast interpretation choices.
Jack Cumming III – who enjoys taking up that cudgel (cf. his recent close gaze at William Inge’s Picnic) – comes boldly to his decisions throughout this revival. So, while watching Cummings’ production, a spectator may suppose other sequences could be convincing when played quite differently, it’s difficult to criticize his result.
Where he has Albee’s characters rage all but boundlessly, another director might just as effectively have them quietly simmer. Where he has frightened characters seem to modulate their concerns after announcing them, another director might just as effectively have them continue to display their pressing worries sub rosa, sotto voce. Cummings has his perspectives and sees that they all register.
The plot turn that puts a director – and audience members – to a test occurs towards the first-act finish. Upper-class suburban homeowners, local club members and martini enthusiasts Agnes (Mia Katigbak) and Tobias (Manu Narayan) have been having cocktails with Agnes’ alcoholic sister Claire (Carmen M. Herlihy) and dealing with the imminent return of daughter Julia (Tina Chilip), who’s about to divorce for the fourth time.
As Tobias, Agnes, and Claire give into sometimes repressed anger and, more often than not, ferociously unrepressed anger – anger, if not fury, being the motivating energy of the time, as Albee habitually experienced it – they’re interrupted by a troubling turn of events.
Best friends Harry (Paul Juhn) and Edna (Rita Wolf) are at the door and well-dressed, as they all are in Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes. At first conversational, Harry and Edna are not just dropping in. They’re proposing to stay after abandoning their own nearby home. They declare they’ve just experienced an encroaching “terror,” the origin of which they can’t explain.
Throughout the second and third acts the six at sixes-and- sevens characters grapple with the complications arising from the new house set-up. Paul and Edna have usurped Julia’s bedroom, which Julia, at her appearance, transforms into an instant crisis.
Relationships between and among Tobias and Agnes and Harry and Edna – the latter two increasingly more proprietary – are also fraying. Claire, often supine on the floor, makes a habit of drinking well before the sun dips below the yard arm.
When Jack Paar hosted The Tonight Show, he once asked regular guest Robert Morley for a definition of good theater. Ever the pundit, Morley replied, “Four people come on stage, sit on a sofa and talk.”
Set designer Peiyi Wong – working on a long, raised platform separating the audience on bleachers – does Morley one better. He has two leather sofas (one smooth, one tufted) placed on a Persian rug, and facing each other, with a drinks hutch directly behind one. Surrounding the platform on a lower shelf are books, below which are myriad lowball glasses. Behind the main playing area is a tall staircase.
On those sofas and moving between and around them and slowly climbing or descending the staircase, the skilled six actors confront the disease Albee is identifying with his dreamed-up situation: a penetrating case of dis-ease.
The agitated well-heeled, well-educated figures – see George, Martha, and Nick of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – dealing with an inexplicable terror was Albee’s (lemon?) twist at his writing. And the unsettling attitude accurately and incisively reflected a prevailing 1960s mood.
Moreover and pertinent to our best playwrights having something of the visionary about them, A Delicate Balance could strike today’s audiences as even more timely. The impression isn’t merely lent by a gasp-worthy line Tobias mutters about the Republican party’s “brutal” actions.
More immediately, the terror invading living-rooms across the land as mid-term elections spread fear of democracy’s fragility underlines Albee’s prescience. Were he here now to tweak the play, as he often indicated he’d like to do on his canon, he would have Tobias and Agnes quickly understand and sympathize with Harry’s and Edna’s upset. They might welcome their chums as equally sharing their panic.
Incidentally, Cummings has approached his Albee revisit – lighting by R. Lee Kennedy – with what used to be considered non-traditional casting. Part of his valid point is that no matter the culture in which A Delicate Balance is played, the conditions are universal. How right he is, and how right Albee was and remains.
A Delicate Balance opened November 6, 2022, at the Connelly Theatre and runs through November 19. Tickets and information: transportgroup.org
