A Delicate Balance

WOBBLING TO IMBALANCE

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is ostensibly about boundaries among family and friends—when intrusion violates the sanctity of privacy. For dramatic symmetry, he throws in cryptic fear—spreading as if a plague. With often meandering dialogue, coming with strict acting instructions about which the author demands adherence, his inchoateness on the need for a balance in relationships is barely intelligible, not explaining why we should give a damn. Exploring unspecified angst, he’s probably partly delving into the inner terror of not feeling loved, validated or worthy, which he experienced as a youth from his parents, somewhat represented by Katharine Hepburn’s Agnes and Paul Scofield’s Tobias. (Their son’s dead before the play starts, replaced by a sister.) Something else is off too: If accepted that the play is meant to be serious, and initially played as such on Broadway as well as in this American Film Theatre version, the only possibilites for audience tolerance are guessing what’s going on, a regular if irritating Albee device, or, happening frequently, watching good actors working their asses off to make this wobbler satisfactory. Preferring the term “translating” to screen over “adapting,” which more or less means he’s trying to stay within the communal experience of theatre to reduce the intrinsic power of movies eliciting singular viewer responses, Albee’s cracks of “truths” as digs are negated by non-communal cinematic closeups. With director Tony Richardson and photographer David Watkins compliant in efforts to turn a real London house into a transformed (or worse, a pseudo) theatre, this presentation, clumsily structured, is set mainly in a few rooms, staircase landing and a solarium; Albee’s crabbiness seems to want to escape the confines to West End comedy. When Betsy Blair’s Edna and Joseph Cotten’s Harry as husband barge in on Agnes and Tobias seeking shelter from a flare-up of whatever, Blair turns into a venomous Lady-in-Waiting-for-Something sounding like Pamela Brown when slapping another refugee—Lee Remick’s multi-married loser Julia, daughter of Agnes & Tobias, who hysterically rants with a revolver in her hand. As this affront occurs, Hepburn, Scofield, Cotten and Kate Reid as Claire, Agnes’s sister as resident leech, just stand there without intervening; the expectation for a just and juicy retaliation over violation of trespass fails to arrive. This constipated assault begs to be farce; wanting to laugh, we don’t because Albee’s sneers and clogs get in the way. (Years later he would direct to high acclaim a comedic Correctol to free the play’s jam ups.) With Richardson guiding the “seriousness” without his own discernment of the “whatever” culprits triggering invasions of privacy and insecure relationships with family and friends, he accedes Scofield to be conflicted, confused and confusing; commanding as his speaking voice is in climatic bantering with Cotten, Scofield doesn’t clearheadedly respond to Cotten’s likely lack of reciprocity of safe harbor in the future. And Cotten plays with such dicey dignity that we can’t be sure if he’s aware of the acidic hilarity in the retaliative bomb. (In comedy versions the character gets laughs.) In Margaret Furse-designed Dalmatian or cheetah-spotted caftan and the classiest brown & black kimono, neither of which hide what appear to be either two wrist watches or a watch on one arm and a medallion as bracelet on the other, Hepburn risks releasing the playwright’s gas to a sphere of poetic farting while sneaking her customary glances at the camera and using her old trick of laughing as she’s talking, only to sink into a dignified malaise of bafflement. (She admitted never understanding what Albee was writing about, a concern shared by Vivien Leigh who, just before her death, was scheduled to do the play in England.) Looking terrific in her Charlie’s Angels hair, Remick is just about as 70s shallow; amusing, even a bit embarrassing as she recalls Patty Duke’s Neely without mascara as naughty adult child screeching away at Hepburn in the solarium and Cotten and Blair in the living room. Taking over from Kim Stanley (who had a breakdown during rehearsals, thus intolerable to impatient Hepburn), Reid also suffers—from a case of the boozed uglies—yet with only a few days notice to prepare she’s way beyond being merely adequate. When the play first opened on Broadway in 1966, it was thrashed by many critics including Walter Kerr in the N.Y. Times and Robert Brustein in The Third Theatre; while winning a handful of Tony award nominations, including best play, only Marian Seldes won as best featured actress playing Julia, making us wonder what she was doing to be honored and missing in Remick. The most mileage Albee gained from the play wasn’t in receiving his first Pulitzer prize—by most accounts bestowed less for merit than consolation for a previous decision by the trustees of Columbia University to veto the judges granting the award for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? due to language and subject—but in rejecting it. While enjoying his public vitriol, some of us believe he knew A Delicate Balance didn’t deserve any prizes.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com