The set tells us a lot. R. Michael Miller’s design for the Berkshire Theatre Company production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is an oh-so-typical prosperous suburban living room, with elegant furniture, orderly bookshelves and a well-stocked and frequently visited liquor cabinet. Everything about it signals “upper-class WASP family drama.”
But the walls are high and constrict the playing space, the wide windows curtained against the outside. Here the rituals of family discord are played out in a physically and emotionally claustrophobic arena. And here, as in many of Albee’s plays, there’s something unsettling, even terrifying, lurking in the wings, which suddenly lands onstage.
This family comprises the 60-ish couple Agnes and Tobias, she a prickly patrician who speaks in epigrammatic paragraphs, he a dormant volcano; their 30-something daughter Julia, whose fourth marriage has just collapsed; and Agnes’s unmarried sister Claire, who insists she’s “not an alcoholic, just a drunk.” The ties that bind these relatives are well-frayed but maddeningly unbreakable.
Into the menage of resentments and self-delusions come Harry and Edna, best friends (as everyone keeps reminding themselves and each other) of Tobias and Agnes. They’ve come not for a chat but for shelter, after being suddenly overwhelmed by a nameless fear. And here the play spins into metaphor and the graceful living room becomes a haunted house.
In David Auburn’s tidy production, the play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, has been subtly updated (the word “dull” in Tobias’s reference to “our dear Republicans, as dull as ever” is changed to “brutal”). But it’s still an old-style fourth-wall drama given a surreal spin. Through this comfortable, Shakespeare-quoting household with (unseen) live-in servants move the ghosts of a dead child and a secret affair, and the arrival of Harry and Edna brings “a disease, a plague” of fear and doubt, throwing life’s discontented but comfortable equilibrium out of balance.
Maureen Anderman captures the brittle elegance of Agnes’ speech patterns, but seems separate from the rest of the cast, who give us more naturalistic rhythms. Jonathan Hogan’s Tobias is genially self-contained, letting the others’ barbs fly about him till he finally blows. Lisa Emery is a wonderfully ironic Claire, a self-mocking rather than self-pitying drunk. Mia Barron gives Julia the right touch of regressive adolescent snottiness as she whines that Harry and Edna have usurped her bedroom. And Keir Dullea and Mia Dillon, as the uninvited guests, bring a chilling niceness to their overtly symbolic roles.
Relationships, Albee is saying, are predicated on maintaining a delicate balance between rights and responsibilities, needs and resentments, love and fear. The play is about blood ties and friendship, flight and sanctuary, and the nature of home, where, as Robert Frost put it, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
A Delicate Balance: Through Sept. 4, Berkshire Theatre Festival, East Street, Stockbridge, (413) 298-5576, www.berkshiretheatre.org.
