Towering John Lithgow Dominates ‘Delicate Balance’ Revival On Broadway
7 / 10
A storm rages at the center of the Broadway revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. Though camouflaged in the elegant, comfortable mufti of the affluent upper classes, it's leveling everyone in its wake while leaving the building intact, like a neutron bomb. Its name is John Lithgow...surveying it all, tolerating it all, the affable Tobias of John Lithgow smolders, bursts into flame and slowly grows cold. It's as rich a performance as I've ever seen, the achievement of a lifetime spent commuting brilliantly between New York stages and Hollywood screens of every size...Nothing in Pam MacKinnon's finely calibrated but emotionally uneven and infrequently unnerving staging measures up to the sheer power of either Albee's dramaturgy or Lithgow's inhabitance of Tobias. There is no better interpreter of Albee today; her revival of Virginia Woolf was nothing less than a revelation, in part because its ensemble was perfectly knit. Such unity is absent here in a stellar cast that nevertheless seems mismatched.
