From: The Hollywood Reporter
By: David Rooney
Date: 2014-11-20
8 / 10
What impresses arguably even more than the performances, however, is the structural brilliance of Albee's writing...Close's Agnes is all glacial poise, with articulate language to match. She rarely raises her voice above a genteel coo, even when speculating almost wistfully about the prospect of a retreat into madness...Despite his nominal position as patriarch, Tobias is a weaker specimen than either his wife or sister-in-law, and the key choices of his adult life have been about insulating himself from the truth. His tumble down the treacherous well of self-knowledge makes him the most affecting character, and Lithgow's performance is tremendous as Tobias releases years of pent-up anguish...There are piercing moments of pathos in all the performances...The director's blocking is impeccable, firmly delineating both the reaffirmations of power and the challenges to it...Both harsh and heartwrenching, this is a needling play that's of its time and yet still surging with post-modern vitality. Its dialogue and characters border on arch but are ineffably human.
From: The New York Times
By: Ben Brantley
Date: 2014-11-20
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.
