Reviews

A Delicate Balance

Glenn Close and John Lithgow revive Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama at the John Golden Theatre.

John Lithgow and Glenn Close star as Tobias and Agnes in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, directed by Pam MacKinnon, at the John Golden Theatre.
John Lithgow and Glenn Close star as Tobias and Agnes in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, directed by Pam MacKinnon, at the John Golden Theatre.
(© Brigitte Lacombe)

Alcohol flows freely in the home of Agnes and Tobias, the chilly spouses at the center of Edward Albee's Pulitzer prize-winning A Delicate Balance. The gin-soaked family drama, which first premiered on Broadway in 1966 with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn as the estranged husband-and-wife pair, opened its latest revival this evening at the John Golden Theatre — now with Glenn Close and John Lithgow, two members of an equally elite Broadway class, filling their separate bedrooms. Permanent residents and temporary guests alike roam their "large and well-appointed suburban house" (as Albee describes in his famously specific stage directions) and imbibe at all times of day, brushing off an early-morning cocktail as merely a very late night cap. But rest assured, it's all in the name of maintaining that delicate balance that keeps family, friends, and lovers together for decades on end. Just beware the booze-induced sleepiness that may result from this tedious presentation of Albee's densely packed purple prose.

Director Pam MacKinnon, who struck Tony gold in 2013 with her electric revival of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, seems to have picked up a wet match for her second Broadway turn with the lauded playwright. Like Virginia Woolf, A Delicate Balance examines a devolving marital relationship, while also extending its insights to the corroding ties between friends, parents, children, and relations of all sorts. Over the course of a weekend, all of these unstable bonds find their way into Agnes and Tobias' household — an atmosphere represented by scenic designer Santo Loquasto's perfectly manicured living room with high ceilings, plush furniture, and shelves of fragile ornaments whose well-being depends on a collective and perpetual holding of the breath. Agnes (Close) is certainly not short-winded, as she displays in her opening monologue about the possibility of impending madness, but her words are so meticulously chosen and innocuously spoken that she seems to come without the force of exhalation.

Close, a three-time Tony winner who makes her much-anticipated Broadway return after an absence of nearly two decades, masters Agnes' austere presence as the self-proclaimed "fulcrum" of her family. Her cold eyes and upright posture make for an immovable maypole, keeping everything and everyone in her immediate vicinity within its designated bounds. And there is plenty to be monitored: She permanently houses her "willfully" drunken sister Claire (whose brazenness seems an unnatural fit for the usually brilliant Lindsay Duncan); she perpetually holds onto suspicions of her husband's past infidelities; and her 36-year-old daughter Julia is fleeing home to escape her fourth marriage. All the while a pair of old friends, Harry and Edna, show up on her doorstep looking for shelter from some elusive terror.

Agnes' stoicism in the midst of these crises may not fill her family with love and joy, but this pragmatic attitude certainly keeps it tightly "in shape," as she likes to say. Maintenance of calm, after all, as Albee probingly and cynically observes, seems to be the most one can ask for in life. A yearning for more, however, is undoubtedly embedded beneath Agnes' rigid exterior. Though from Close's performance, you would think there is nothing that could ever wrinkle the flowing outfits in which she superciliously glides across the stage (a series of elegant costumes designed of an ambiguous era by Ann Roth). The one emotional conversation she shares with her husband about his brief return to their communal bed hardly scrapes the surface of what surely lurks beneath her porcelain shell. Without a warm-blooded humanity registering on the stage, the show's collective pulse quickly drops to flatlining levels.

We do, however, get the benefit of a few jolts throughout the nearly three-hour-long play. Clare Higgins, as the home-intruding Edna, transforms from meek houseguest to presumptuous authority, putting her friends' adult daughter Julia (Martha Plimpton) firmly in her place in her own childhood home. In response, Julie vehemently claims this territory for herself in a violent meltdown— a vigorous performance by Plimpton who nevertheless seems unsettled in the skin of her overgrown child of a character.

Lithgow, meanwhile, reaches stunning depths as Agnes' tacit partner-in-life Tobias. Like Shakespeare-done-right, he finds a natural voice in Albee's abundant and potentially numbing text. His final scene, which lands Lithgow on his knees in desperation before his best friend, Harry (the comically squeamish Bob Balaban), lends the play its one and only window into the loneliness that mortally terrifies each of Albee's characters. And, as the playwright says, when your only options are "love and error," the stakes are high in this delicate balancing act.

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