Albee's 'A Delicate Balance' in New York

That’s the spell that Santo Loquasto’s stunning set casts in A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee’s devastating play about loneliness, darkness, and the spiritual void that yawns before us. The so-called home of Tobias and Agnes (presumably somewhere in affluent Westchester County) is a trap for some of the most tortured souls you’ll ever see on the stage.

A Delicate Balance begins like a drawing room comedy gone terribly wrong. (After all, it’s theater of the absurd.) A middle-aged couple sits in their living room, sharing a drink on an ordinary Friday evening. Their conversational tone is so relaxed and intimate that you almost don’t register what they’re saying. “What I find most astonishing….is the belief that I might very easily lose my mind one day,” says Agnes pleasantly. The line contrasts so sharply with the setting that it almost gets a laugh. But it doesn’t.

Slowly, the illusion of warmth and safety is dispelled, and a wintry freeze descends on that deceptively cozy cocoon. Something is terribly amiss. Tobias and Agnes may be talking, but not to each other, rather into some chilly void. There’s a deep chasm between them of unresolved issues that are soon revealed. There’s Claire, Agnes’s troubled sister, who lives with them and is constantly stirring the cauldron of conflict. “I am ‘a’ alcoholic,” Claire announces proudly, as she commands the meek Tobias to fix her another drink while she pours her Martini salt in her sister’s open wounds. There’s daughter Julia, who is about to return to the empty nest after her fourth failed marriage; and there’s the ghost of Teddy, the son Tobias and Agnes lost years ago.

A knock on the door

Then there’s a knock on the door. It’s Harry and Edna, their best friends, who have arrived uninvited. After social pleasantries are exchanged, the newcomers reveal the true purpose of their unexpected visit. “We were sitting home…we were all alone…and then…we got frightened.” They announce, to Tobias and Agnes’s amazement, that they are moving in.

“I was wondering when it would begin,” says Claire, who serves as the Greek chorus of Albee’s tragedy on American family life.

Acts II and III deal with how Tobias and Agnes cope with their empty nest, now crowded with refugees from loneliness and dread of the dark. “What do Harry and Edna want?” cries Tobias, as Agnes accuses them of bringing their terror into his home “like a plague.” Meanwhile, Agnes desperately tries to fill the void with domestic order and the appearance of normality. “Do we dislike happiness?” she asks. “We manufacture our own despair.”

But Agnes can’t stop the truth from revealing itself. Why won’t Tobias “do something” about the “plague” that has invaded their home? Does he actually want all these lost souls there? Why has Tobias left Agnes’s bed? Were Tobias and Claire having an affair? Did Tobias deliberately discourage Julia from going back to her husbands, so that she would remain in her childhood room, dependent on Daddy? Does Tobias really want Harry and Edna to stay?

These questions are posed with increasing urgency, until Tobias finally cracks in Act III. That explosion, delivered by John Lithgow with such anguish and naked pain, is almost unbearable to watch. (Everyone around us in the audience was sobbing at that point, men and women alike, along with the actor).

Indeed, every one of the six splendid actors on stage gives sharply etched, deeply moving performances. Lindsay Duncan is brilliant as the so-called “Claire on the sidelines.” She plays the role with a blistering sense of humor, a feral survival instinct, and a blinding insight into what’s going on. Martha Plimpton performs “Julia of the four failed marriages” with the rage of a child who, in her own words, “wants what is mine!” but doesn’t even know what that is or should be. As Harry and Edna, Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins are heartbreaking and at the same time frightening in their steely resolve. And the imperious Glenn Close reigns over the household like a stoic hostess on the Titanic.

Same as it ever was

“I’ve been writing the same play my whole life,” I once heard Edward Albee say, unapologetically. Family, loneliness, and terror of “the dark sadness” (as he calls it) are themes that run through Albee’s plays from The Zoo Story to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Three Tall Women to The Goat.

But underlying those tragic themes is the elusive element of love. At one point in the play, Tobias tells a disturbing story of a cat he once had that didn’t like him. Angered by the cat’s indifference, he shakes the animal and accidently kills it. The fear of what he was capable of doing still haunts him. “If we do not love someone . . . never have loved someone . . .” says Tobias, who doesn’t finish his sentence. “You want love, l-o-v-e, so badly — but you hate, and you notice that you’re more like an animal every day,” echoes Claire.

No matter how dark an Albee play gets, there’s always that unfinished sentence, that hope — however faint — that love will save the day, if only we are capable of it. As Agnes says on the morning after those terrifying 48 hours, “We’ll all forget…quite soon. Come now; we can begin the day.”