Date: Fri 13-Nov-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Quick Words:

Albee-Players-Schofield

Full Text:

THEATRE REVIEW: Albee At His Most Accessible, And Town Players At Their Best

By Julie Stern

In The Art of Loving , psychoanalyst Erich Fromm discussed the existential

dilemma of being human, observing that individuals have always attempted to

escape the pain and fear of "separateness" through intoxication, mass

conformity and unhealthy attachments, all aimed at obliterating the lonely

awareness of self.

The only real solution, Fromm wrote, comes when a person has enough confidence

and trust to relate to others in a genuinely caring way Fromm calls love.

Unfortunately, he continued, the pressures and values of our society are more

conducive to what he called "pseudo-love," or narcissism, in which the

vocabulary of "love" is used to cloak neurotically selfish and immature

behavior. Instead of alleviating the loneliness, pseudo-love relationships

only increase anxiety and feelings of emptiness.

This seems a remarkably apt introduction to the ambitious work with which the

Town Players have chosen to close their 1998 season: Edward Albee's troubling

portrait of suburban midlife crisis, A Delicate Balance .

Like many of his plays, this one takes a comfortably familiar situation and

gives it an ominously surrealistic twist. Agnes and Tobias, a well-to-do

couple settling in to placid early retirement, troubled only by the presence

of Agnes' alcoholic younger sister Claire, receive word that their daughter

Julia is leaving her husband and coming back home... for the fourth time

(well, it's the fourth husband, after all).

Moments later the doorbell rings and their best friends, Harry and Edna,

arrive unexpectedly, explaining that while sitting in their own house they had

become frightened and did not want to be alone. Therefore it was natural for

them to turn to their best friends.

By the time Julia gets home -- this 36-year-old woman is demanding a return to

the comfort and security of being a little girl, yet again -- her old room has

been taken over by Harry and Edna, who have already gone back and collected

all their clothes so that they can move in for good.

A master of language, Albee builds up his drama with layers of parable and

imagery. In a burst of frankness, Tobias confesses to his family how, as a

teenager, he had his pet cat killed because it had "stopped loving him." He

forced it to sit in his lap, he tells them, but it refused to purr and so he

had the vet put it to sleep.

Claire, who has chosen a life on the sidelines but whose prophetic vision cuts

through the facade of complacency, remarks that they are all sitting in

solitary pools of isolation in a doctor's waiting room, while they "await the

results of the biopsy."

This reference to the unspoken nightmare lurking behind the apparent

tranquility is the defining metaphor of the play. It is an expression of the

utter aloneness in which they each feel trapped.

Our society lacks a deep sense of communal feeling, Claire tells her niece. We

are outgoing, but we aren't really caring. This is reflected in the sense or

artificiality that shadows the relationship between the characters.

Consummately polite and ostensibly concerned for one another, their

expressions of affection all have a hollow ring.

Everyone pretends. No one admits what he really wants, striving instead to

preserve the delicate balance that pretends that things are still all right...

Lest this sound hopelessly grim, one needs to remember that Albee is a

dramatist of great comic talent with an infallible ear for the nuances of

dialogue that identify real people. And director Suzanne Kinnear has assembled

a red hot cast to portray them.

Jo Voight is masterful as Agnes, endlessly ruminating on petty issues. Maureen

McFarlane invests Julia with the glamorous tyranny of a young Lauren Bacall or

Katharine Hepburn playing the spoiled poor little rich girl.

Betsy Grover is devastating as Claire. She may be drunk, but she is perceptive

and speaks the truth.

And Bart and Ruth Schofield are so mournfully droll as Harry and Edna that to

see them is to recognize the face of suburbia.

A Delicate Balance is by turns funny, familiar, and profoundly disturbing. It

is also Albee at his most accessible: gripping and entertaining, even as it is

puzzling. This is definitely a production worth seeing.

(Town Players will continue with A Delicate Balance until November 28, with

curtain Friday and Saturday evenings. Call 270-9144 to reserve tickets.)