A Delicate Balance

In his magnificent masterpiece A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee fuses big ideas into three elegant acts, crystallizing carefully chosen words into a mysteriously beautiful, strange and very human story. Agnes is the matriarch of an upper-class Connecticut family fraught with problems. Her husband Tobias is polite and detached. Her alcoholic sister is drinking in the living room. And her daughter has come home after another failed marriage. Her neighbors Edna and Harry have decided to move in because they are “afraid” of something. The dramatist calls our bluff on what it means to be “friends” — what it means to be “family.”

Alternating between tragic and comic tones, this splendid, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is both electrifying and thought-provoking. The cast includes Emmy winner Susan Clark, Robin Gammell, Stephanie McNamara and Granville (Sonny) Van Dusen. Directed by Rubicon’s Artistic Director James O’Neil.