Theatre in Review: A Delicate Balance (Golden Theatre)

	John Lithgow, Glenn Close. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Despite the title, there's nothing delicate about A Delicate Balance; the words on the program, "by Edward Albee," should put an end to that notion. Once again, the playwright has assembled a crowd of well-spoken, well-heeled neurotics, provided a well-stocked bar to keep them lubricated, and given them a day-into-night-into-day in which to bare their sickened souls. The difference in this play is, the sickness is contagious. How much the contagion affects you may depend on whether or not you have spent an evening with Albee's chilly menagerie in the past.

Barely has the curtain risen before Glenn Close, as Agnes, the mistress of this household filled with troubled souls, is perched on the sofa, accepting a brandy, and wondering, most elegantly, what the chances are that she will go stark raving mad. "Agnes sits by the fire," she says, imagining her dim future, "her mind aloft, adrift." She advises her husband, Tobias, "Nothing to do with the poor old thing but put in her a bin somewhere, sell the house, move to Tucson, say, and pine in the good sun and live to be a hundred and four."

What is really eating at Agnes is the presence of her sister, Claire, whose epic appetite for alcohol, and her perpetually loosened tongue, has ruined yet another family dinner. Claire's drinking has reached the point that she can no longer take care of herself; she has become a permanent fixture of the house, and not a welcome one. Perhaps sensing that after-dinner drinks are being served, Claire emerges from her room to offer a mea culpa of sorts. "I apologize that my nature is such to bring out in you the full force of your brutality," she tells the unappreciative Agnes. A minute later, Claire is sunnily imagining what it might be like to take a gun and shoot off everyone's heads. She also stoutly denies that, unlike the members of her AA group, she isn't an alcoholic; rather, she insists, she is a drunk. "They were sick and I was merely willful," she notes by way of explanation. Agnes responds, "If you are not an alcoholic, you are beyond forgiveness," and adds that if Claire is trying to kill herself, she had jolly well better get on with it.

Even if these characters don't display the no-holds-barred venom of the boozing academics in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley. And it will come as no surprise that the tony cast assembled by director Pam MacKinnon glides over Albee's perfectly formed paragraphs with the skill of Olympic skaters. And yet the malice between Agnes and Claire is oddly muted, their mutual tension curiously slack. Even when Claire enters the room armed with an accordion, primed to yet again shatter Agnes' nerves, I wasn't struck by the audacity of the gesture: I merely wondered where Claire had obtained such an instrument. Close and Lindsay Duncan would seem to be ideal candidates for Albee's special brand of sniping -- among other things, each has distinguished herself as the scheming, acid-tongued Marquise de Merteuil in different versions of Les Liaisons Dangereuses -- but their feuding lacks a certain conviction, resulting in a nagging sense of dissatisfaction that plagues this production. Too often, they seem to be standing outside their characters, rather than inhabiting their furies.

I fully admit to being in thrall to Gerald Gutierrez's 1996 revival of A Delicate Balance, in which the relationship between Rosemary Harris' grandly above-it-all Agnes and Elaine Stritch's supremely insolent Claire was marked by a persistent underlying tension, their line readings packing a scorpion's sting. When Stritch's Claire spoke about her boozing, it felt like you were right with her, staring into the bottom of a bottle; her Claire was funny, harrowing, and completely unforgettable. Nothing in the first act of MacKinnon's production comes close to matching it.

As I mentioned, the unhappiness in A Delicate Balance is viral, and before long, Harry and Edna, close friends of Agnes and Tobias, show up, unexpectedly and surprisingly unwilling to leave. The reason: "We were frightened and there was nothing," says Edna, close to tears. Also on the way home is Julia, daughter of Agnes and Tobias, fleeing her latest broken marriage. With all this added freight, the sinking ship of Agnes' household is in danger of tipping over. "I was wondering when it would begin... when it would start," Claire says. When Tobias, bewildered, wonders what she is talking about, Claire chuckles, "Don't you know yet? You will."

A week after seeing the current production of A Delicate Balance, Stritch's reading of those lines reverberates in my head far more clearly than Duncan's. A Delicate Balance is hardly a work of naturalism -- its style is too mannered, its action too inexplicable -- but it should be informed by a stark psychological reality, which MacKinnon's production achieves only some of the time.

I hasten to add that neither Close nor Duncan can be entirely dismissed. Close really shines in the final act, when she explains to Tobias, in no uncertain terms, that it is his job to decide what to do with Harry and Edna, and it is her job to facilitate his decision. Looking her husband in the eye, keeping her voice even, she quietly reads him the riot act, and you see that her seeming passivity, her insistence on good manners, is a screen for a surprising amount of steel. Oddly, Duncan is at her best in repose; check her out on the sidelines and you will see that rare thing, an actress who really, deeply listens. She makes it devastatingly clear that whatever goes on in this house, Claire doesn't miss a trick.

However, the evening indisputably belongs to John Lithgow's Tobias. Even in the early scenes, in which he functions as little more than a shuttlecock, batted about by his wife and sister-in-law, he is the soul of weakness, a well-mannered caretaker for the more ulterior members of his household, who would like nothing more than to retreat into the quiet with his newspaper and a nice glass of something. But as the situation becomes more dire, he rises to the occasion. Possibly the most memorable thing in the entire production is the sight of Lithgow, at the end of Act II, sitting in his well-upholstered chair looking out, the fear of some nameless dread flickering in his eyes. And he is nothing less than stunning in the climactic scene in which Tobias finds himself suddenly begging the departing Harry and Edna not to leave. ("This is my house! I want you in it! I want your plague! You've got some terror with you? Bring it in!") His Tobias unravels in front of us, slipping from nervousness to anxiety to flat-out terror, and, finally, we feel the cold anguish that lurks under Albee's elegant words.

There's also fine work from Martha Plimpton in the thankless of role of Julia; she makes us see that, in both her imperiousness and fear of disorder, she is truly her parents' child. Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins are acceptable as Harry and Edna, but I missed the sense of free-floating anxiety, combined with an astonishing sense of entitlement, that John Carter and Elizabeth Wilson brought to the roles in the 1996 staging.

The action unfolds on a setting, by Santo Loquasto, that may be too gorgeous for its own good. The script specifies "the living room of a large and well-appointed suburban house." Loquasto gives us a mansion with miles of detailed classical molding, a cool green palette, sumptuous furnishings (with touches of chinoiserie), and a chandelier that makes the one at the Majestic Theatre look like something from a tag sale. It's a kind of well-appointed mausoleum, which, I suppose, is not inappropriate, but surely it is too heavy and realistic for Albee's play. (Fortunately, Brian MacDevitt's lighting provides a series of quietly beautiful time-of-day looks, the best of which features morning sunlight creeping in, bit by bit.) There are quibbles to be had with Ann Roth's costumes, as well; I understand that Tobias and Agnes are supposed to be haute-WASPs, but was it necessary to dress Lithgow in a patterned shirt with patterned slacks, a patterned sweater, patterned socks, and patterned tie? The effort to dress Close in outfits that indicate Agnes' deep level of repression has resulted in outfits that are, I think, unnecessarily unattractive. Scott Lehrer's sound design provides a couple of minor cues.

After Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance is probably Albee's masterpiece. Unfairly dismissed at its premiere, it has come to be accepted -- in no small part thanks to Gutierrez's revival. It is unfair to expect MacKinnon to achieve similarly revelatory work, but it is surprising that the director, an Albee specialist, should miss the mark in so many instances. For all its grace notes, this production doesn't amuse and frighten as it should; the fear that runs rampant in the play stays firmly on the other side of the curtain, retaining a decent distance from us.--David Barbour