A Delicate Balance
at the Golden Theatre
John Lithgow and Glenn Close in A Delicate Balance.
The play’s
not the thing, exactly, when it comes to the slightly lethargic revival of
Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance at
the Golden Theatre. Neither is the cast,
though the packed houses for the production, which opened on November 20th,
are no doubt drawn by the formidable presences of John Lithgow, Bob Balaban,
(to a lesser extent) Martha Plimpton, and, notably, Glenn Close, returning to
the New York stage after a 22-year absence.
It’s the execution. Director Pam
McKinnon, who succeeded so enormously with her previous Albee revival, 2012’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, puts a
bloodless spin on this play that leaves its already bloated second act seeming
even longer and less significant.
Most of the
meatiest dialogue in this, Albee’s tenth play, is delegated to the matriarch
and patriarch of a wealthy suburban family, Agnes (Close) and Tobias
(Lithgow). Agnes’s finest hour comes in
the play’s opening scene, when she discusses with Tobias—or, rather, talks at
him about—the possibility that she may one day go insane, leaving him to fend
for himself. Does the fact that she is
speculating about her own possible insanity prove, inherently, that she
isn’t? Agnes backtracks, starts, and
rests while her browbeaten husband nods agreeably, perfectly setting up the
eventual revelation of her character’s manipulative and imperious nature. The scene, which lasts for fifteen minutes or
so, is glorious.
Then
Lindsay Duncan enters as Agnes’s alcoholic sister, Claire. Lindsay Duncan is, clearly, talented. She puts on a not-entirely-vain effort to
lift the incredibly morbid script, which, as the resident comic relief, is
ostensibly her job. But for whatever
reason, she halts the fire. From her
entrance on, the show is almost entirely dead.
The characters are completely audible, but the spectator feels as if
they’re whispering. The fire that ran
through, say the last actress to play Claire, Elaine Stritch (in the 1996
revival), does not run through the actors in this production. Much of the play is guarded, gloomy, lacking
in energy. Ms. Close’s ice queen act,
which has become her trademark, drags on after a while. Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins, as a couple
who come to stay with Agnes and Tobias with no excuse other than that they “got
frightened,” are occasionally psychologically terrifying, the way they should
be, but mostly unaccountable. Martha
Plimpton, as Agnes and Tobias’s daughter, Julia, is a strident over-actor. (Her performance as a white-trash grandmother
in the Fox sitcom Raising Hope had
more subtlety.) But for occasional
flashes of brilliance from these no-doubt experienced performers, the play
sometimes flags during the second act, and loses the audience’s attention. (If Ms. Plimpton can run onstage with a gun
and fail to rouse the torpor, I can’t imagine what would have.)
What swoops
in to save this production—and I venture to say that it is saved—is the
performance of John Lithgow as Tobias. I
have seen Mr. Lithgow’s every American stage performance over the past four
years, and have not once been disappointed for a moment in his phenomenal
characterization. Here, at last, is a
man with fire in his veins, and not a moment too soon. Tobias’s incredible journey, from put-upon
retiree to trembling on the outskirts of insanity, is vividly drawn by Mr.
Lithgow’s skilled hand. Though he
improves every minute he’s on the stage (his reading of the “I had a cat”
speech during the first act is thrilling), where he shines brightest is the
third act. Where Ms. Close made the
beginning memorable, Mr. Lithgow makes the ending unforgettable. Reduced to questioning the meaning of love,
friendship, and stability, he rails at Mr. Balaban’s character as, unbeknownst
to him, his family looks on. As a
paragon of wisdom and steadiness collapsing gradually into a ruin, Mr. Lithgow
becomes the tragic hero of the piece. It
is a triumphant performance—not an astonishing one, because audiences should
expect no less from him, but a triumphant one.
At the end
of the day it comes down to the structure of the play. The first and second acts deal with deep,
existential truths (Albee’s bread and butter), while the second deals with
petty dinner party jealousies. (It’s
also awkwardly split by the only scene break in the show.) Ms. McKinnon could have made the slower bits
more interesting, the way she did in Virginia
Woolf (although, to be fair, that far superior play had many fewer sagging
sections). But, like Santo Loquasto’s
weirdly pristine set design, this production is too whole, too undamaged, by
play’s end. And, as Mr. Albee once wrote
in The Play About the Baby, “If you
have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?”
