A Delicate Balance Revival
Run Time:
Two hours and 55 minutes
Opened: November 20, 2014Two hours and 55 minutes
Closing: February 22, 2015
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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
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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.
Glenn Close and John Lithgow too restrained in ‘Delicate Balance’
4 / 10
This new "A Delicate Balance" is like a Christmas fruitcake that's been left out too long: It's boozy and loaded with goodies -- Glenn Close! John Lithgow! -- but it's also on the dry side. The booze you can almost taste because Edward Albee's characters are constantly liquoring up, probably to make up for their boredom. It's a feeling you too may share during Pam MacKinnon's bloodless production. She did a much better job with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" two years ago...As the play turns to the absurd, Albee's writing brims with black humor and red-hot loathing. The show, by contrast, is a benign beige. Lithgow is best when Tobias is playing along with the women in his life, but his big letting-it-all-out scene feels forced. And Close's one-note, tight-lipped performance keeps the audience at arms' length, the way Agnes distances herself from family and friends. A delicate balance? By the end of Act 3, it might refer to the one between wakefulness and sleep.
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A Delicate Balance FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
A Delicate Balance has had 5 productions including Broadway which opened in 1966, Broadway which opened in 1996, Broadway which opened in 1996, Broadway which opened in 2014 and Off-Broadway which opened in 2022.
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