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 symmetry, he throws in the fear of rejection—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 penetrable, neglecting to inform why we should give a damn. Exploring unspecified angst, he’s probably delving into the inner terror over not feeling loved, validated or worthy, experienced as a youth from his adoptive parents, somewhat represented by Katharine Hepburn’s Agnes and Paul Scofield’s Tobias. (Their son’s dead before the play starts, replaced by a daughter/sister.) Something else is off too: If accepted that the play is meant to be serious, and initially played as such on Broadway and in this American Film Theatre version, the only possibilities for audience tolerance are guessing what’s going on, a regularly irritating Albee device, or, happening quite often, watching good actors working their asses off to make his wobblers satisfactory. Preferring the term “translating” to screen over “adapting,” which might mean he’s trying to stay within the communal experience of theatre to reduce the intrinsic power of movies exposing dramatic chicanery, Albee’s cracks of “truths” as digs are negated by closeups allowing multiple interpretation. (His infamy in not issuing character clarifications, that the actors themselves must find their own way, reinforces alienation.) With director Tony Richardson and photographer David Watkins compliant in efforts to turn a real London house into a transformed (or 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 as she slaps another refugee—Lee Remick’s frequently 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 discernment of the “whatever” culprits triggering invasions of privacy and insecure relationships with family and friends, he accedes to Scofield’s conflictions and confusions and creates both in the audience; 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 characters get laughs.) In Margaret Furse-designed Dalmatian or cheetah-spotted caftan and the classiest brown & black kimono, 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 memory-of-lines situation during rehearsals, 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 influential 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—bestowed less for merit than consolation for a previous decision by Columbia University trustees to veto the judges granting the award for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—but in rejecting it. While enjoying his public vitriol, many of us believe Albee knew A Delicate Balance didn’t deserve any prizes for writing.

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