A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee
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Book Reviews of A Delicate Balance
Book Review: my favorite Albee play
Summary: 5 Stars
Edward Albee is best-known for his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a Broadway classic that was made into a film starring a young Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. However, this play, A Delicate Balance, is my favorite out of Albee's plays, and I've read nearly all of them. It won Albee the first of his 3 Pulitzer Prizes, and was made into a film starring Katherine Hepburn.
The story focuses on an aging WASP couple, Agnes and Tobias. Agnes' alcoholic sister, Claire, lives with the couple. Then events, or rather people, intrude into this carefully ordered household. First, two old friends, Harry and Edna, arrive without warning and ask to stay for an indeterminate time. Then Julia, the daughter of Agnes and Tobias, also asks for refuge. Cracks form in the veneer of control and peace that Agnes has cultivated. The character of Claire (a delightful drunk if there ever was one) steals the show as she alternately mocks the situation and tries to help the people involved.
As in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the characters occupy intensely charged domestic landscapes, inner spaces of anxiety and dread, and the climaxes of both plays are punctuated by speeches from the main characters. These monologues roll out with a cathartic force equivalent to operatic arias. True to its title, though, the play as a whole feels restrained and delicate, its turmoil gurgling underneath.
Since Albee is a playwright who is extremely sensitive to the musical, rhythmic aspect of drama, his plays can unfold in a reader's mind as easily, and perhaps more perfectly than if they were realized on a stage. Albee himself has compared playwrights' scripts to musical scores. Like a musician who can read music and then "hear" it in his mind, those readers who are comfortable reading dramatic dialogue and stage directions can easily experience A Delicate Balance in the privacy of their rooms.
Book Review: Brilliant dialogue, witty, sarcastic, and sad
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the first of Edward Albee's plays to garner the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. The other two were Seascape and Three Tall Women. Probably his most popular is Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
A Delicate Balance is comprised of brilliant dialogue, mostly short snippets, and some very meaningful longer dialogue. It is dialogue that offers sarcastic humor and provides a continuity of mystery that provokes thought. There are not excessive stage directions or character descriptions, it is all in the dialogue.
To view this onstage would take a great stage direction and better castmembers who can pull it off with intense theatrical skill as Albee intended.
Tobias and Agnes are a well-to-do middle-age couple's questionable balance in life is disrupted when "hangers on" invade their space. At home is Agnes' alcoholic, witty younger sister Claire (mid 30's) and their four times married daughter Julia is coming back home, routinely. Harry and Edna, dear friends of Tobias and Agnes come to stay because they are fearful and we are kept wondering what has them so scared that they need to leave their own home.
Things get heated when Julia arrives, again, and Harry and Edna take up her room and she retaliates furiously, openly and child-like. We learn that Tobias had an affair, they had a son who died young, and they have not slept together for years.
This is a great play that focuses on the truth and illusion in marriage, a popular theme of Albee's. The first performance in New York Sept. 1966 starred Hume Cronyn and his wife, Jessica Tandy, two of the best in theatre. That would have been a great performance. .....Rizzo
Book Review: READ IT READ IT READ IT READ IT READ IT
Summary: 5 Stars
I am writing ANOTHER review because I CANNOT EXPRESS to you how wonderful this play is. I just read it for the second time. It is one of the three best plays I have every read in my life, and believe me, I have read all the plays worth reading. This is almost as good as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Once again, I love love love love love this play and all the characters. There is a movie. Don't see it. The play is better. Read the play. There are many great moments: Tobias' "cat speech," Tobias' memorable four-page closing speech, all of Act Two Scene Two, all of Act Three, Claire's disturbing interpretation of what it's like to be an alcoholic...they go on and on. This is my theory of what the play is about essentially: this is the story of a family who does nothing all day but sit and drink and b*tch about how terrible their lives are. They have lots of money. They have good friends and a good family. But they have let their lives go to waste. They've let life pass them by. Now they are old and sit back and realize how much they've missed. But not before much turmoil and anger are let out. There are a husband and wife in the play who sleep in separate beds, until one night, for lack of room, they are forced to sleep together and they realize: THEY LIKE IT. But they have wasted years and years of sleeping in separate beds. Am I rambling like a lunatic? Sorry. Just read it please or else I have typed all of this for no reason at all.Book Review: One of Albee's Best
Summary: 5 Stars
Albee, the playwright who invented one of the more complicated and vivid relationships ever in a play in ZOO STORY, has again demonstrated his intimate knowledge of the deeper motives behind human interaction. Every interaction between characters in this play -- from long monologues to short snippets of conversation -- has behind it some manner of conflict. Everybody in this play needs change, and can only reach it through the destruction of others; Tobias and Agnes who simply want to be left alone, but whose house has been invaded; Julia, the daughter who is betrayed by the fact that her parents gave away her room; Claire, who wants only to excercise her right to a good time; Edna and Harry who aren't quite sure what they need, and subsequently frustrate everyone else.
This is a very heavy play, but written in a such a way that is has the guise of being a comedy. A must-read for anybody that loves drama.
Book Review: Bizarre and Wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" is certainly a strange and fascinating play. Like most of Albee's plays, it only has a limited number of characters (six), much booze, crumbling marriages and long nights filled with hurtful remarks. A complicated and compelling story of an aging couple, the wife's brash sister, the couple's dissatisfied daughter, and two friends who drop in unexpectedly one night. Worth a look.
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