“A Delicate Balance”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2010

Although I adore the image the precariously balanced cocktail glasses that the BTF is using as their poster image for this production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, the balancing act referred to in the title are the family dynamics we so carefully structure and then tip-toe around like the fragile house of cards that it is. I use family here in its broadest possible sense – the people you live with, the people you are related to by blood, the people you love or who love you. Breathe on it and it all falls down.

Albee won his first Pulitzer for A Delicate Balance in 1967, but that was only because he was denied the award three years earlier for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This is not his best play, nor has it stood the test of time particularly well. Albee retains complete creative control over his works and so there is no way to update the script or rethink the staging. In this world of reality TV we spend waaay too much time exposed to the maggots hidden under the Hollandaise Sauce of life. Not only is the concept that the apparently shiny veneer of upper-middle class life a sham old news, but the style of the play – in which people soliloquize endlessly in lush, sweeping prose – feels cumbersome. The set and costumes are realistic, but the plot and dialogue are surreal.

This is the first production of A Delicate Balance that I have seen, and it is the first play of Albee’s that I have not liked. It feels like a vastly restrained version of …Virginia Woolf? which at least offers the horrific fun of watching George and Martha and Nick and Honey disintegrate. At the end of A Delicate Balance the shattered cocktail glasses have all been swept neatly under the couch and the charade recommences. We end where we began and none of the characters have learned or grown from their experience.

A Delicate Balance was the tenth of Albee’s plays to be produced and it was his first attempt to portray his adoptive family on stage. Albee was adopted shortly after birth by Reed Adalbert Albee and his third wife, Frances “Frankie” Loring Cotter. The family was wealthy, the money coming from the Keith-Albee Vaudeville circuit which Reed Albee’s father had founded, and they lived in the swanky Westchester County town of Larchmont, NY.

Albee has been quoted as saying: “I don’t think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn’t know how to be a son, either…most kids are trapped into feeling an obligation to their natural parents. For what? For being born, I guess. Foolish notion, but still. And, since I didn’t relate to these people, and I knew that I wasn’t from them, I had a kind of objectivity about the whole relationship.” Which is about as honest appraisal of that thoroughly dysfunctional family dynamic as any.

There is no question that the ample, book-lined sitting room in which A Delicate Balance takes place is an amalgamation of the Albees’ Larchmont home and The Hommocks, the nearby home of his paternal grandmother, and that its owners, Agnes and Tobias, are Frances and Reed Albee.

Agnes and Tobias are Frances and Reed, and Agnes’ alcoholic sister, Claire, is Agnes’ alcoholic sister, Jane, although Jane did not live with the family as Claire does here. Agnes and Tobias’ daughter, Julia, was based on Albee’s cousin Barbara, also an adopted child. Harry and Edna, the friends and neighbors whose sudden decision to move in upsets the delicate balance of the precarious family in the play, share the same names as Harry and Enda Winston, the neighbors and business friends of the Albees. Albee has said the Winstons were the last people his parents would ever have taken in because they were Jewish and his mother was anti-Semitic.

In the play the initial “nuclear family” consists of Agnes (Maureen Anderman), Tobias (Jonathan Hogan), and Claire (Lisa Emery). Shortly, Agnes receives a phone call that their daughter, Julia (Mia Barron), who is 36 going on 16, is coming back home, fleeing her fourth marriage. Their only other child, a son, Teddy, died in infancy. Before Julia get there, Harry (Keir Dullea) and Edna (Mia Dillon), Agnes and Tobias’ life-long friends and Julia godparents, appear on the doorstep and announce that they are moving in, fleeing an unnamed “terror” in their own house. When Julia arrives and finds Harry and Edna ensconced in her bedroom, she is NOT happy.

Agnes and Tobias are immobilized by their own code of hospitality and the upper-middle class WASP style of communication which regards as taboo any confrontation or expression of deep emotion. They literally cannot throw Harry and Edna out, even when their demands and behavior are clearly inappropriate. Julia has a complete meltdown and makes her feelings very, very clear – much to her mother’s horror. Julia’s rage at having her room, a symbol of her place in the family, usurped is an obvious throwback to the sibling rivalry she felt at the birth of her brother, and then the anguished guilt she felt after his death. Julia is NOT about to share her parents with anybody, apparently not even Claire.

Albee has said that in his first draft of this play that Claire threatened to take over and that he had to cut many of her lines and scenes. She is named Claire because she, alone, sees and speaks clearly about the family dynamics, and she remains the most interesting character in the play. So it is not surprising that I got a kick out Emery’s performance (who knew she could play the accordion?) and her truth-saying.

While Claire is the most entertaining character and Agnes is clearly the head of the family, the center of this production for me was Hogan’s Tobias.

Albee claimed to have the most trouble with the character of Julia, and, from Barron’s performance he apparently never resolved those issues. It is impossible to imagine this child as a much-married woman of 36. At one point Claire describes her as a whiny brat, and she is absolutely right. No wonder she can’t keep a husband.

Dullea and Dillon, who are married in real life, are obviously having fun on stage in the small and meaty roles of Harry and Edna. Because the characters they play are patently unreal and absurd, Dullea and Dillon play them absolutely straight as the most affable and banal of WASPs. The effect is hilarious and chilling.

Anderman’s Agnes is a monster, ruling the whole family with an iron fist, especially her husband. Agnes and Tobias sleep not just in separate beds, but in separate bedrooms. He provides the money and she runs the house, controlling everyone but the perpetually drunk Claire.

Actually, while Claire is depicted and referred to as the alcoholic, and her constant state of inebriation gives license to her outspokenness and socially inappropriate behavior, everyone in this play drinks constantly. One of the trickiest bits of staging must have entailed figuring out whose glass was where and what everyone was drinking (either clear or colored water/iced tea).

Albee’s script states that the action of the play takes place “now.” R. Michael Miller has designed a handsome, realistic set. There is nothing on the set to establish the era – no phones, TVs, etc. – and Wade Laboissonniere’s costumes, while archetypically preppy/WASP (good thing Talbot’s is just up the road!), are also modern. Scott Killian has composed an interesting piano score of incidental music, but I did find the actors hard to hear at the start of the play. Somewhere along the way someone turned up the mikes, my ears adjusted, or they started speaking louder.

I was going to write that I wasn’t thrilled with David Auburn’s direction, but I realize that the playwright is really the one who dictated what how the show would look (Albee must approve the choice of director, actors, and designers, and has final approval on sets, costumes, lights, etc.) and so all I can really say is that no one fell off the stage. This show looks and sounds the way Edward Albee wants it to look and sound. It looked pretty enough, but to me it sounded stilted, dated, and melodramatic. By the end I was tired of looking at a stage full of actors standing around pretending to be riveted to the endless monologue of whoever’s turn it was to spill their guts. Life is hard and everyone is miserable. So, what else is new?

Click HERE to see a photo gallery for this production.

The Berkshire Theatre Festival production of A Delicate Balance runs through September 4 on the Main Stage, located between of Rts. 7 & 102 on the BTF campus in Stockbridge, MA. The show runs… Tickets range from $15-$63. For tickets contact the BTF Box Office at 413-298-5576 or visit www.berkshiretheatre.org for more information.

WARNING: The BTF is determined to keep the run time of this show to a minimum and so they hustle you in and out very briskly at the two intermissions. There really isn’t time to buy and consume a beverage or snack, and if you find you need to use the facilities make a dash for it as soon as the lights come up.

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