A Delicate Balance Revival 2014
Run Time:
Two hours and 55 minutes
Opened: November 20, 2014Two hours and 55 minutes
Closing: February 22, 2015
A Delicate Balance - 2014 Broadway History , Info & More
John Golden Theatre (Broadway)
252 West 45th St. New York, NY
A DELICATE BALANCE, Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning masterwork returns to Broadway with an extraordinary cast.
In A DELICATE BALANCE, Agnes (Glenn Close) and Tobias (John Lithgow), a long-married couple, must maintain their equilibrium as over the course of a weekend they welcome home their 36-year-old daughter (Martha Plimpton) after the collapse of her fourth marriage, and give shelter to their best friends (Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins), all the while tolerating Agnes' alcoholic sister Claire (Lindsay Duncan).
The Daily News calls A DELICATE BALANCE "a beautiful play- easily Albee's best and most mature, filled with humor and compassion and touched with poetry." It "proves that old-fashioned stage virtues- originality of voice, depth of feeling, richness of language- can still provide a thrill" (TIME Magazine). "If you really care about serious theatre, brilliant theatre, great acting, and great playwriting, this is the only play to see on Broadway" (New York Post).
A Delicate Balance - 2014 - Broadway Cast
PREVIEW A Delicate Balance - 2014 - Broadway
Photos
Videos
FEATURED REVIEWS FOR A Delicate Balance
Pretty Crowded for an Empty Nest
6 / 10
Hope arrives in the form of dread toward the end of the first act of Edward Albee's 'A Delicate Balance'...Up to that point in this production, directed by Pam MacKinnon, it's been hard to detect much feeling of any kind within the carefully color-coordinated, dust-free, energy-free environs that have been installed onstage. To be sure, the three talented and celebrated people we have been watching up there thus far -- Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Lindsay Duncan -- have been delivering their characters' zingers and stingers with crispness, clarity and, when one feels an important theme coming on, heavy italics. Yet they have the distant, flattened dimensions of specimens under glass...But then -- oh, sweet deliverance -- here come good old, miserable, intrusive Harry and Edna to shake things up...As embodied by Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins, Harry and Edna arrive like a gust of -- well, I was going to say fresh air, but what Harry and Edna bring with them is something noxious and polluted...Their acting is more subtle than anybody else's here, but it is also bone deep...Yet in this version of 'A Delicate Balance,' there is no underneath. Its stars speak the lines as if they -- I mean, the performers, not the characters -- know exactly what they're saying and why...As you would expect of these highly accomplished, multi-award-winning cast members, none of them are bad. But they're giving us the play, instead of living it.
An Albee Revival Tries Again
7 / 10
At its best, it's thought-provoking and sometimes challenging, but it takes a long time to get moving, and I wonder whether modern-day audiences will be willing to wait for it...While the notion that well-to-do WASPs are dead inside is perhaps the least little bit overfamiliar, this is still a fairly promising setup for a theater-of-the-absurd comedy...'A Delicate Balance' comes across like a dramatically static rewrite of 'Virginia Woolf' with rather less drinking and much less cursing...Pam MacKinnon, who staged last year's outstanding Broadway revival of 'Virginia Woolf,' is Mr. Albee's preferred director, so we can assume that this direct, unmannered production is what the author had in mind...Ms. Close's performance is quiet, tasteful and underprojected, not surprising for an actor who has been absent from the stage for so long. Mr. Lithgow, by contrast, is in extraordinary form, by turns tightly inhibited and almost shockingly anguished.
Category
1 - 24 of 24
A Delicate Balance History
Other Productions of A Delicate Balance
| 1966 | Broadway |
Broadway |
| 1996 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
| 2014 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
| 2022 | Off-Broadway |
Transport Group Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
Videos