Balancing Act
By Dalt Wonk
DECEMBER 1, 1997:
I apologize that my nature is such to bring out the full force of your
brutality," says Claire, the unrepentant drunkard, as she makes her first
entrance in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, now on view at Rivertown
Rep.
"I apologize for being articulate," rejoins Agnes, her sister.
Agnes actually says a good deal more (for she is not only articulate but
garrulous), but this barbed riposte is at the heart of her reply. And it is
also at the heart of what is most enjoyable in the play: an insistence on the
delight of language.
Albee seems to have set for himself the task of creating a sort of avant-garde
drawing room comedy. A dark comedy, and one with serious aspirations, but a
comedy nonetheless.
The literate tone is set by the central characters, all members of a
well-educated, upper-middle-class family who navigate their classically
dysfunctional relationships amid a glimmering torrent of words. Not that Albee
makes the neophyte's mistake of substituting speeches for action. Many of the
exchanges are short, pithy and connected by an amusing submerged logic of inner
compulsions and past references.
The characters have as part of their fundamental makeup a very special gift of
gab. For instance, when Julia, the 36-year-old daughter, returns home from the
wreckage of her fourth marriage, her father berates her for coming back to
"nestle and whine." She retorts that "as she reached her somewhat angular
adolescence," he "sank to a cipher" and then became a "gray non-entity." This
is a family that cultivates verbal dexterity.
The situation is basically this: Agnes and Tobias are a couple in the autumn of
their lives. (The season of the year is autumn as well.) They live in a
well-heeled New England suburb, where life revolves around the country club. An
autumnal, elegiac mood pervades the play -- sometimes with a wistful potency,
as in passages about the feeling of a house at night, when its occupants are
asleep; sometimes in lines of strained lyricism, like "everything comes too
late," when there is nothing left but "rust and bones and the wind."
In any case, Agnes and Tobias are not without their problems. One set of
problems revolves around Claire, Agnes' entertaining but provocative drunk of a
sister. She lives with the couple, fights continually with her disapproving
sibling and flirts with her brother-in-law. The other problem -- the root cause
of their "dysfunction" -- is the devastating, unexorcized grief for an infant
son who died decades ago. This loss ended the sexual side of the marriage and
accounts for the neurotic and abrasive behavior of the daughter, Julia.
Into this emotional welter, Albee introduces his "avant-garde" idea: a
neighboring couple who become possessed by a sudden terror of existence and
arrive at the family's doorstep with a firm determination to move in. They seem
to have arrived not only from a nearby house, but from a different dimension of
dramatic reality -- as though an Ionesco character had stepped into a play by
William Inge.
It then becomes Albee's inescapable task as a playwright to show how the
arrival of the neighbors forces some sort of resolution -- or at least
significant transformation -- of the family's previous impasse. For me, this
moment never arrives, and the play lacks a satisfying sense of convergence.
But A Delicate Balance, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967, serves as a
bold and challenging reminder that Rivertown Rep is not merely in the
entertainment business. It is a serious artistic venue willing to take chances
on an unconventional script.
And the production, under Joe Warfield's direction, offers many pleasures. The
central trio of actors -- Janet Shea (Agnes), Eliott Keener (Tobias) and Abbey
Lake (Claire) -- creates an upscale, alcohol-soaked slough of despond, which is
simultaneously literate and amusing. Gina Porretto is credible as Julia, the
eternal adolescent, while Pauline Prelutsky and Charles Bosworth preserve
intact the mystery of the neighbors. The set by Robert Self is apt, and the
costumes by Elizabeth Parent are effective.
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