A Delicate Balance Revival
Two 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
Theater Review: A Delicate Balance, Still Necessary and Brilliant
9 / 10
To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece...Albee manages to keep the sadness, the mystery, and the ruthlessness in dynamic equilibrium, tipping this way and that but never crashing...Each fury, and there are many, is perfectly faceted and then rotated to capture different angles of the light...Luckily it is piercingly clear at the center. The question of what Agnes and Tobias should do about their best friends' need for succor grows quickly horrific after its hilarious introduction. This turn is partly the result of very fine work from Bob Balaban, and especially Clare Higgins, as Harry and Edna, who keep, yes, a delicate balance between the absurdity of their blandness and the primal terror of their plight. To watch Higgins flip from pitiful tears to snappish moralizing, both of them genuine, in a few lines of dialogue is to watch real character being built in real time. If neither Martha Plimpton as Julia nor Lindsay Duncan as Claire reaches quite the same extremes of inhabitation, they are both fine in difficult roles...It's enough to be in the presence of these words again. That they indict even as they tickle makes their pleasure more satisfying.
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 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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