A Delicate Balance Revival
Run Time:
Two hours and 55 minutes
Closing: February 22, 2015Two hours and 55 minutes
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
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.
'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.
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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 |
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