Patti Gardner and Tom Wahl as the central couple in Island City Stage’s A Delicate Balance
By Bill Hirschman
A nameless terror has upended the fragile homeostasis in Agnes and Tobias’ carefully-ordered uppercrust existence, all the more frightening because its anonymity makes it uncomfortably universal for the audience at Island City Stage’s superb production of Edward Albee’s complex and challenging A Delicate Balance.
But the arrival of their best friends seeking permanent refuge from this virulent dread is only a surreal catalyst. It mercilessly forces Tobias and us to scrape away the polite lubricant of societal conventions to examine the absolute truth of our relationships with those we say we love.
What opens as a play about a troubled family of privilege, which keeps our attention simply because they are engagingly hyper-articulate, then ends as a shattering indictment of self-deception, hypocrisy and a refusal to accept the responsibility to make a decision in human interaction.
The entire play posits a settled household and life, well provided for, routines for those living there. But cracks are exposed that go deeper than just a difficult sister and daughter. This is the start of an ever-speeding evolving corkscrew into dissolution.
This Olympian cast, invisible precise direction by Michael Leeds, elegant set and matchless character-underscoring costumes make this one of the highlights of this and likely any other season.
A Kelvin chilling section depicts the friends settling in as if their unfettered invasion is rooted in something deeper than their right and their expectation that their friends must embrace their occupation as a responsibility.
As we wrote about earlier Balance productions in Florida, this laudable edition is not for everyone, in part because this difficult and disturbing play weighs in just under three hours. But also because Albee has created a never-flagging torrent of rich ideas passing by too quickly to savor. It’s like chugging a connoisseur-worthy wine. A smart audience member will just be grateful for the intermittent cups they can grab of the flood that rages past them.
The complexity of the work is daunting for cast, director and even the audience. A half-dozen themes intermingle plus a dozen ways to interpret them. While that does not endorse any patron from shortchanging their analysis, it does not condemn anyone from focusing on three or four them without too much guilt. This masterwork is, to understate it, dense.
Furthermore, the team has mastered the sadistically challenging text with its half-sentences, pauses and ambiguities. But as is true of so many great plays, the cast will doubtless be finding new dimensions by the closing matinee weeks from now.
This 1966 play has echoes of Albee’s earlier Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with its wicked wit, educated people spouting aphorisms and alcohol-fueled spiral descent into the core of human failings.
The first act sets out the supposed relationships of characters present and soon to arrive. Agnes (the peerless Patti Gardner) and Tobias (an amazing Tom Wahl) are stiff-upper lip patricians who have settled into their understated suburban mansion. Like some marriages, their union is not so much idyllic as having found a comfortable accommodation of personal weaknesses and past sins.
The titular balance not only encompasses but embraces the chronic return of Agnes’ younger sister Claire (Betty Ann Hunt Strain), a burned-out, truth-telling cynic who says she can’t deal with the positive-thinking Alcoholics Anonymous because she is not an alcoholic, she’s a hopeless drunk. Her cardinal sin in her sister’s eyes is a lack of the gyroscopic self-control that the couple prize. And their middle-aged daughter Julia (Sabrina Lynn Gore) is en route home again after the disintegration of her fourth marriage. This flinty family has its share of willfully ignored secrets, sorrows and repeated disappointments that now feel like betrayals of trust. While these people may be dysfunctional themselves, they have cobbled together a functional framework.
The women in particular snipe at each other with martini-dry thrusts worthy of the Algonquin Round Table such as Claire embracing Julia at one moment, then saying a bit later, “You don’t look bad for a quadruple amputee.” Like George and Martha, they know each other’s vulnerable spots and no longer worry about jabbing them.
Agnes is the self-described fulcrum of the family who keeps the ship afloat. But she relies on Tobias to chart the course. Tobias lovingly deftly sidesteps being a direct player or referee in any bouts when he can avoid it.
That ends when the couple’s doppelgangers Harry and Edna (Christopher Dreeson and Margery Lowe) appear at their door gripped by a terror that came over them sitting at home. Like lost children, they ask if they can stay. At first, it seems to be just for a night, but then they announce they will stay permanently as if it is a foregone conclusion. This sits badly with Julia who needs all the mothering she can get right now.
Christopher Dreeson and Margery-Lowe being comforted — for the moment — by Patti Gardner
They don’t make themselves at home; they simply make the house their home – exemplified by Edna sitting on the sofa, working some needlework as if it is her own living room. Harry offers the house’s liquor as if it is his to dispense.
At first, there is a seeming lack of passion, a quality unnecessary in those previously settled arrangements and relationships. Self-control is prized. The family motto is “We do what we can.” Conversation is small talk and recollection reveries. But when Harry and Edna invade, the long-buried resentments swirl faster and faster.
Clearly, no one wants the couple to stay,least of all Agnes who believes they have brought what she calls a psychic plague. But Tobias has defined his sense of self-worth in his professed relationship with Harry and Edna as his best friends. He must analyze just what that relationship is and, by extension, the genuineness of his relationship with the people he loves.
Someone asks Tobias, “What do you have in common with these people?” and later, “Would you give Harry the shirt off you back?” These are questions Tobias would have given a knee-jerk assent before this night. Now, his bluff has been called and he is being forced toward making a decision whether to insist they go – and what that says about him and the fragile belief system he has constructed. .
That swirl ends up in an inevitable confrontation, but one which is intentionally difficult to decode as to who fully accepted responsibility for settling the dilemma – if indeed anyone did. Does someone make a decision? Harry and Tobias are on cusp but alternately saying it and backing off because they are allowed to.
And what a cast! Gardner, simply one of the region’s finest actresses, instantly inhabits the complex Agnes from the very first phrase of the play: “What I find most astonishing… is the belief that I might lose my mind one day,” delivered with an inseparable mixture of crystal and steel and the detached curiosity of an almost scientific observer.
She reveals strength dealing with her drunken sister and troubled daughter. But when Tobias wants her to make the crucial eviction decision, she retreats into citing the long-established roles, “I shall keep this family in shape, not solve its problems.” Gardner masterfully handles Albee’s cruelly Byzantine verbiage.
Wahl delivers one of the most carefully wrought roles of his career here. His Tobias starts out warmly smiling, satisfied — what Claire snarks as being more a squire than a businessman. His Tobias is never a caricatured fuddy-duddy or snob, but someone for whom a smooth well-ordered existence is a virtue and a prize that has been earned.
Slowly, Wahl takes Tobias a rung at a time down the kind of tightening coil of emotion that he has spent his life avoiding. The change in his bearing, in his voice subtly marks the transformation to agonized self-awareness, carrying us with him.
Lowe, who has created as many memorable roles as nearly anyone currently on Florida stages, creates an unforgettable antagonist. She can project Edna’s initial terror upon arrival yet one scene later be absolutely transformed into the source of terror herself calmly stitching needlepoint on the sofa without thought, assuming that she would never need permission. Her eyes and her lips and her regal voice command obedience.
Gore makes a convincing Julia — a 36-year-old woman needing attention from her parents in solving her self-constructed dilemmas. She illustrates Julia’s bewilderment that her parents don’t immediately throw over their friends for a blood relative’s needs.
Hunt Strain’s Claire sadly observes sees the devolving situation as accurately as anyone in the room. She finds and combines Claire’s self-disgust and intelligence as smoothly as the liquor she swills.
Betty Ann Hunt Strain and Sabrina Lynn-Gore
Dreeson has played everything from Horace Vandergelder to Tennessee Williams himself. But his Harry here is certainly the most skilled work we’ve seen him do. Harry’s initial fear of the unknown because it is unknown, has him almost shaking, staring straight ahead and inarticulate. But unlike Edna, Dreeson allows you to see the increasing discomfort under Harry’s surface. His emotional wrestling match with Tobias in the penultimate breakdown is the apex of the production.
And it seems unfair to wait this long to acknowledge Leeds’ detailed attention to actors’ line readings and pauses, the pace of the show, melding the themes, planning fluid blocking while characters talk to each other non-stop – attention down to having Tobias and Agnes touching each other and kissing the top of each other’s head but not their lips.
Crucial to creating the seemingly solid environment is Robert F. Wolin’s tasteful long-occupied living room bedecked with wood paneling, elegant but practical furniture, bookcases stocked with leather-bound volumes, art on the walls ranging from landscapes to cubist, and a well-stocked bar with cut-glass highballs, goblets and snifters.
Tobias and Agnes are instantly identifiable as far as class, income and taste thanks to W. Emil White’s eloquent costume design, but even more so for Claire’s brightly patterned poncho and pajamas, and Julia’s borderline ‘60’s hippie jeans with embroidered flowers. But especially notable is how everybody sports jewelry that underlines their character from multi-colored bracelets to jeweled pins.
A Delicate Balance won Albee the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes in 1967. (One of the shameful scandals in Pulitzer history was the committee’s timid refusal to give any award the year that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf bowed.) By this time, he had found his heightened lyrical voice, luxuriating in characters who spoke in lazy reminiscences, allusions and extended metaphors.
Post Virginia Woolf, Albee took his language another leap forward with rhythms and precisely-chosen verbiage ranging from straight-forward to nearly Shakespearean in their vividness and their structural complexity. Words flow from these characters’ in metaphors, longing arias of remembrance and prickling dry humor.
It was mounted at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton with Pat Nesbit in the 2019-2020 season, and at Palm Beach Dramaworks in 2012 with Maureen Anderman, Dennis Creaghan and Angie Radosh.
The original cast in 1966 included Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Marian Seldes; the 1996 Broadway revival with Rosemary Harris, Elaine Stritch George Grizzard; a 2014 revival with Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Bob Balaban; a 1973 American Film Theatre production with Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Lee Remick, Joseph Cotten, and Kate Reid.
A Delicate Balance runs through Feb. 9 at Island City Stage, 2304 N. Dixie Hwy, Wilton Manors, FL 33305. Performances 7 p.m. Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday; 5 p.m. Sunday; For tickets 954-928-9800 or boxoffice@islandcitystage.org. Running time is three acts over 2 hours 40 minutes including two intermissions.
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