'A Delicate Balance' review: Great Edward Albee, tepid production
6 / 10
...although the play still dazzles with wit, gorgeous writing and the lurking terror of mortality, we miss the accumulating shock he gave to the characters' lives of cozy self-satisfaction. Director Pam MacKinnon...spells things out here instead of letting Albee toy with us through suggestion and suspense...Albee...challenges actors with tyrannical syntactic demands -- mouthfuls of polysyllabic, unforgiving, grown-up paragraphs that require virtuosos to make them sound like speech. Lithgow is droll and manor-born as the retired Tobias, though we never believe he is as ineffectual as Agnes claims. Oddly, Close, who has three best-actress Tonys, seemed daunted at a recent preview by Agnes' exhilarating but Olympian monologues. Stumbling over the words is a special problem for a silver fox who fancies herself the fulcrum of the family's equilibrium...instead of upsetting the balance of self-satisfied old money, the scene screams ostentation. Nothing, alas, is delicate.
.gif?width=300)
