A DELICATE BALANCE, Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning masterwork returns to Broadway with an extraordinary cast.
In A DELICATE BALANCE, Agnes (Glenn Close) and Tobias (John Lithgow), a long-married couple, must maintain their equilibrium as over the course of a weekend they welcome home their 36-year-old daughter (Martha Plimpton) after the collapse of her fourth marriage, and give shelter to their best friends (Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins), all the while tolerating Agnes' alcoholic sister Claire (Lindsay Duncan).
The Daily News calls A DELICATE BALANCE "a beautiful play- easily Albee's best and most mature, filled with humor and compassion and touched with poetry." It "proves that old-fashioned stage virtues- originality of voice, depth of feeling, richness of language- can still provide a thrill" (TIME Magazine). "If you really care about serious theatre, brilliant theatre, great acting, and great playwriting, this is the only play to see on Broadway" (New York Post).
What impresses arguably even more than the performances, however, is the structural brilliance of Albee's writing...Close's Agnes is all glacial poise, with articulate language to match. She rarely raises her voice above a genteel coo, even when speculating almost wistfully about the prospect of a retreat into madness...Despite his nominal position as patriarch, Tobias is a weaker specimen than either his wife or sister-in-law, and the key choices of his adult life have been about insulating himself from the truth. His tumble down the treacherous well of self-knowledge makes him the most affecting character, and Lithgow's performance is tremendous as Tobias releases years of pent-up anguish...There are piercing moments of pathos in all the performances...The director's blocking is impeccable, firmly delineating both the reaffirmations of power and the challenges to it...Both harsh and heartwrenching, this is a needling play that's of its time and yet still surging with post-modern vitality. Its dialogue and characters border on arch but are ineffably human.
To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece...Albee manages to keep the sadness, the mystery, and the ruthlessness in dynamic equilibrium, tipping this way and that but never crashing...Each fury, and there are many, is perfectly faceted and then rotated to capture different angles of the light...Luckily it is piercingly clear at the center. The question of what Agnes and Tobias should do about their best friends' need for succor grows quickly horrific after its hilarious introduction. This turn is partly the result of very fine work from Bob Balaban, and especially Clare Higgins, as Harry and Edna, who keep, yes, a delicate balance between the absurdity of their blandness and the primal terror of their plight. To watch Higgins flip from pitiful tears to snappish moralizing, both of them genuine, in a few lines of dialogue is to watch real character being built in real time. If neither Martha Plimpton as Julia nor Lindsay Duncan as Claire reaches quite the same extremes of inhabitation, they are both fine in difficult roles...It's enough to be in the presence of these words again. That they indict even as they tickle makes their pleasure more satisfying.
1966 | Broadway |
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1996 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2014 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2022 | Off-Broadway |
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