Examined through Edward Albee's ironic mindset, marriage and life are a balance of friends and family, morals and manners, neatly sidestepping messy complications. Under the nuanced helm of director Pam McKinnon (director of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance is currently in revival at Broadway’s John Golden Theater.
Living comfortably in a prosperous suburb, retired Tobias (John Lithgow) and his wife Agnes (Glenn Close) are an upper-class couple, everything a smooth veneer over emotional disengagement. Agnes has devoted her life to maintaining an organized lifestyle and, at the top of the play, as the couple is having their evening cognac, she muses over maintaining this style if, by some improbable chance, she loses her mind. Half-listening, Tobias sips his drink, reads his paper and occasionally retorts with a dry comment. Out of synch with the couple is Claire, Agnes' alcoholic sister played by Lindsay Duncan, trying her best to irritate her sister and her patrician environment.
A sudden challenge to the tentative peace of the household is the unexpected return of Agnes' and Tobias' daughter, Julia (Martha Plimpton), who just left her fourth husband. Then her parents' closest friends, Edna (Clare Higgins) and Harry (Bob Balaban), appear at the door, stating that something terrible frightened them at home. What that was is not evident. They just feel they have a right to come and stay with their friends and have now ensconced themselves in Julia's room.
Agnes and Tobias are faced with making a decision on how to deal with Julia who wants her room back, and their friends. How much do they owe their middle-aged daughter and is there any limit to close friendship? And the terror, what is it? Perhaps a fear of dying, a plague, or some breaking-news horror facing humanity.
Lithgow is in his element as the elusive Tobias, always present even in his placid silences, a man satisfied in his elegant skin. That is, until his friends finally decide to go home. Then it occurs to Tobias that he is as terrified and isolated as they. At the end of this play, his plea for Harry to stay reveals a desperate finale to a situation that Albee leaves to the audience to decipher.
Although she occasionally fumbles her lines, Close, with her sharp features and distinct diction is spot-on as Agnes dressed in WASP refined chic by Ann Roth. She has acerbic speeches for any occasion, deliciously barbed with articulate elegance, yet beneath Agnes’s ice, there is little depth. Duncan gives a layered portrayal as Claire, a happy, not a falling-down drunk, with an evident undercurrent of bleakness. Playing the adolescent 36-year-old teen is Plimpton who hovers just on this side of petulance. Higgins is laconic as part of the uninvited couple who came to stay, comfortable in her intrusiveness. Balaban fits right in as the ever-deadpan, taciturn Harry. (Was he really Tobias’s best friend?)
Santo Loquasto's living-room set is elegantly appointed with set-back windows to allow the passage of day to night with Brian MacDevitt's well-designed lighting. Ann Roth has dressed everyone just right. I like Tobias's old-money, careless mix of plaids and prints in the first scene.
Less is never enough for Edward Albee, and A Delicate Balance takes its time to coolly maneuver its way to the unstated point. It's worth the journey if you want to pay the fare.
