Full of backbiting and acid barbs, paranoia and curdled privilege, “A Delicate Balance” is peak Edward Albee. Winning the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Drama five years after the premiere of the playwright’s bilious game-changer “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “A Delicate Balance” bears some of its predecessor’s hallmarks: economically comfortable middle-aged spouses in crisis, airing grievances in an elegant living room, and fueled in part by the appearance of another couple. But “Balance” is a more enigmatic, existential outing, as demonstrated by a solid, occasionally soaring, if sometimes uneven production running through Feb. 9 from Island City Stage. It leaves more questions than answers, and is a more haunting—and haunted—experience for all of its poetic withholding.
At the outset of the play, the home of bickering empty nesters Agnes (Patti Gardner) and Tobias (Tom Wahl) is already more crowded than it should be, with Agnes’ alcoholic sister Claire (Betty Ann Hunt Strain), a fixture as seemingly permanent as the stucco in the foundation, taking up residence upstairs, to Agnes’ bottomless chagrin. Throughout the course of the rest of the play, which takes place over two days and in three acts, more guests will descend on the property. Citing an unspecified sense of terror infiltrating their own home, Agnes and Tobias’ best friends, Harry and Edna (Christopher Dreeson and Margery Lowe) appear at their door like scared strays, asking for—and soon declaring—shelter for the foreseeable future. Complicating matters further, Agnes and Tobias’ troubled 36-year-old daughter Julia (Sabrina Lynn Gore) returns home amid the dissolution of her fourth marriage, a personal failure that the occupants of this now-crowded house seldom let her forget.
There is little plot to speak of in this nearly three-hour exorcism of upper-crust anxiety, decay and longing, so we won’t belabor it here. “A Delicate Balance” is very much a character piece. Albee exposes resentments and buried backstories—an infidelity, the death of a child—with meticulous and lethal precision, but he never quite supplies us with the full panorama of why the characters are such flawed, vicious and deeply unhappy people.
Much of this heavy lifting, then, lands on the direction and cast. Director Michael Leeds’ deft pacing belies the play’s hulking length, and the casting of Gardner and Wahl is his most formidable coup. Gardner portrays Agnes, with her endless pontificating, as the glue that, in her mind, singlehandedly brings a modicum of order to chaos; she loves the sound of her own patrician voice, even if it falls on deaf ears. She’s the yin to Tobias’ yang; the latter is played by Wahl as a meek sentinel, cloistered in his reading chair, not realizing that her space-filling verbosity comes from the same place of avoidance as his quiet desperation. These actors are simply perfect together, with Wahl delivering the production’s most harrowing monologue—involving an alley cat he adopted, only to be denied its love—and its most tortured revelation, late in the third act.
As Harry and Edna, Dreeson and Lowe are initially as tethered to one another’s presence as magnets as they attempt to explain the implacable unease that has wrested them from their home. “Can I go to bed now?” Lowe whimpers, a few minutes into their appearance, a moment that evokes a helpless child more than an adult with agency. But is this presentation a manipulation? The wicked bluntness she exhibits later suggests she is not immune to the contagion of cruelty spreading through the home.
The cracks in this production are visible, and might have been ironed out had Leeds and his team been granted the privilege of a few more preview performances. Every actor delivers fine work, but as Julia, Gore’s abrupt transition into an infantile, gun-toting hysteric, a moment that is supposed to cap Act II on the play’s most dramatic note, is not terribly convincing; and when “slapped” into sobriety by Lowe, the moment plays as so fake as to take the spectator briefly out of the experience.
Strain has many winning moments as Claire, capturing her essence as something of a tarnished jester—from her clownish movements to her performances on the accordion—while occasionally affecting the accents of a Fleet Street waif or a southern belle, to comic affect. But several of her rejoinders fall flat, and she flubbed a few too many cues on opening night. Claire is the play’s most plum part, but aspects of it feel like they were left on the table.
There are few such qualms among the production’s technical aspects. The set and properties, from Robert F. Wolin and Denise Proffitt, respectively, feature walls of a handsome mahogany, a library of leather-bound volumes and the ever-important well-stocked bar. The living space feels curated to Agnes and Tobias’ sophisticated tastes, including the variety of artwork—from cubist to impressionist—on the walls. W. Emil White’s imaginative costume designs reveal character through clothing, from Tobias’ unnecessarily formal dress, complete with sport coat, to Claire’s loud dashiki and series of chunky plastic bracelets on each arm. The hippie-ish floral designs stitched into Julia’s bell bottoms are a nice touch, too.
Like many great plays in the theatrical canon, “A Delicate Balance” will hopefully leave you feeling thankful that your relationships are more loving, and your communication more clear, than those of the unfortunate souls in the well-appointed living room. The play opens with a meditation on madness and closes with a musing on darkness; in between, characters frequently contemplate each other’s deaths, the pitch-black humor barely tempering the agonized undercurrent. Agnes and Tobias’ home may be somewhat less occupied by the play’s bitter end, but the homeowners still have to survive each other—a bleak future of day drinking and scornful glances and separate beds. Shake it off, if you can.
“A Delicate Balance” runs through Feb. 9 at Island City Stage, 2304 N. Dixie Highway, Wilton Manors. Tickets run $43. Call 954/928-9800 or visit islandcitystage.org.
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