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).
'A Delicate Balance' is no play for sissies...All these years later, it's still very disturbing to look this work in the eye...Close, with her fine bones, imperial manner and elegant wardrobe (by Ann Roth), is positively regal as Agnes...Although Agnes admits to the all-too-human fear of losing her marbles and becoming 'mad as a hatter,' she'll brook no challenge to her authority from husband Tobias, played in Lithgow's carefully calibrated perf as a worm of a man -- but a worm who will eventually turn and deliver a blistering reckoning of the family's alienation from the living...It takes guts to take on a role famously played by Marian Seldes in the original production and by Elaine Stritch in the 1996 Broadway revival. So hats off to Duncan for the devilish joy she takes in the spiteful humor of that social rebel, a colorful scandal to the whole family, but a real menace to her sister's domination of the household.
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 |
Broadway |
1996 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2014 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2022 | Off-Broadway |
Transport Group Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
Videos