I was recently reading a play – Nightfall by the Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith – that reminded me a lot of a play I recently saw – Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance in its current Broadway run. Although one takes place on the other side of the world while the other has a thoroughly American setting, both plays occupy essentially the same territory: upper-middle-class angst and secret guilt, played out in comfortable upscale suburban living rooms.
The situations that drive the plays are different, but the ghosts that gnaw at the principals are close relations. In both pieces, a fragile equilibrium, maintained by denial and urbane banter, is shattered by an intrusion that upsets carefully constructed beliefs and expectations. And both plays begin at dusk, that tremulous space between light and dark.
Emily and Edward, the middle-aged couple at the center of Nightfall, are consumed by anxiety over their only child, who ran away from home seven years ago. In A Delicate Balance the web of loss and longing is more complex, but no less visceral.
Most of the excitement surrounding the current revival of Albee’s 1966 Pulitzer Prize winner (and much of the reason for its all-but-sold-out limited run) has swirled around Glenn Close’s much-heralded return to the New York stage after nearly 20 years. She’s paired here with John Lithgow, who never seems to be off the stage these days, having come to this show – his 22nd Broadway appearance – straight from playing King Lear in Central Park last summer.
They portray sixtyish, well-to-do Agnes and Tobias, she a prickly patrician who speaks in epigrammatic paragraphs, he a dormant volcano. They share their elegant home, somewhat unwillingly, with Agnes’s unmarried sister Claire, who insists she’s “not an alcoholic, just a drunk,” and in Act Two (this is a long three-acter) they welcome back home, also with reluctance, their thirtysomething daughter Julia, whose fourth marriage has just collapsed. The ties that bind these relatives are well-frayed but relentlessly unbreakable.
Into the ménage 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.
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 cozy if discontented equipoise out of balance. That invasion provides the foundation for any number of symbolic readings. It can be viewed as a mirror not only of “the dark sadness” Agnes sees in her home and her marriage (the same “dark rooms” Emily refers to in Nightfall) but, seen through the lens of today’s headlines, of everything from post-9/11 paranoia to the Ebola epidemic.
Close and Lithgow play seamlessly together – as they did with two wildly different characters in the 1982 film The World According to Garp. Close, capturing the brittle elegance of Agnes’s speech patterns, dominates the first act with caustic, self-mocking but self-inflating pronouncements on life, marriage and her own fanciful dread of “going adrift” – i.e., crazy – while Lithgow’s Tobias sits “quietly, as always.” When Harry and Edna pitch up on their doorstep, refugees from the psychic storm that’s suddenly gripped them, it’s Tobias, genially self-contained, who welcomes them unquestioningly and then, in Lithgow’s carefully calibrated performance, gradually becomes unmoored himself from his carefully cultivated certainties.
The supporting cast in Pam MacKinnon’s tightly reined production is also pretty much all-star. British stage luminary Lindsay Duncan is Claire, and her wonderfully ironic, fuck-you performance – a self-mocking rather than self-pitying drunk – provides most of the laughs as the increasingly chilling events unfold. Martha Plimpton’s aging gamine persona endows Julia with a regressive post-adolescent snottiness as she whines that Harry and Edna have usurped her childhood bedroom.
Bob Balaban, a recurring presence in Christopher Guest’s satirical films, is Harry, joined by Clare Higgins, another celebrated Brit, as Agnes. These two bring a cringing niceness tinged with entitlement to their overtly symbolic roles, together with a sense of real terror, and spur what could be an Albeean exercise in creepy ambiguity into a high-stakes drama.
In both Albee’s piece and Murray-Smith’s Nightfall, the playwrights are looking at the delicate balance between rights and responsibilities, needs and resentments, love and fear that keeps relationships going. Both plays at heart are about blood ties, 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.”
If you’d like to be notified of future posts, email StageStruck@crocker.com
I was recently reading a play – Nightfall by the Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith – that reminded me a lot of a play I recently saw – Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance in its current Broadway run. Although one takes place on the other side of the world while the other has a thoroughly American setting, both plays occupy essentially the same territory: upper-middle-class angst and secret guilt, played out in comfortable upscale suburban living rooms.
The situations that drive the plays are different, but the ghosts that gnaw at the principals are close relations. In both pieces, a fragile equilibrium, maintained by denial and urbane banter, is shattered by an intrusion that upsets carefully constructed beliefs and expectations. And both plays begin at dusk, that tremulous space between light and dark.
Emily and Edward, the middle-aged couple at the center of Nightfall, are consumed by anxiety over their only child, who ran away from home seven years ago. In A Delicate Balance the web of loss and longing is more complex, but no less primal.
Most of the excitement surrounding the current revival of Albee’s 1966 Pulitzer Prize winner (and much of the reason for its all-but-sold-out limited run) has swirled around Glenn Close’s much-heralded return to the New York stage after nearly 20 years. She’s paired here with John Lithgow, who never seems to be off the stage these days, having come to this show – his 22nd Broadway appearance – straight from playing King Lear in Central Park last summer.
They portray sixtyish, well-to-do Agnes and Tobias, she a prickly patrician who speaks in epigrammatic paragraphs, he a dormant volcano. They share their elegant home, somewhat unwillingly, with Agnes’s unmarried sister Claire, who insists she’s “not an alcoholic, just a drunk,” and in Act Two (this is a long three-acter) they welcome back home, also with reluctance, their thirtysomething daughter Julia, whose fourth marriage has just collapsed. The ties that bind these relatives are well-frayed but relentlessly unbreakable.
Into the ménage 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.
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 cozy if discontented equipoise out of balance. That invasion provides the foundation for any number of symbolic readings. It can be viewed as a mirror not only of “the dark sadness” Agnes sees in her home and her marriage (the same “dark rooms” Emily refers to in Nightfall) but, seen through the lens of today’s headlines, of everything from post-9/11 paranoia to the Ebola epidemic.
Close and Lithgow play seamlessly together – as they did with two wildly different characters in the 1982 film The World According to Garp. Close, capturing the brittle elegance of Agnes’s speech patterns, dominates the first act with caustic, self-mocking but self-inflating pronouncements on life, marriage and her own fanciful dread of “going adrift” – i.e., crazy – while Lithgow’s Tobias sits “quietly, as always.” When Harry and Edna pitch up on their doorstep, refugees from the psychic storm that’s suddenly gripped them, it’s Tobias, genially self-contained, who welcomes them unquestioningly and then, in Lithgow’s carefully calibrated performance, gradually becomes unmoored from his carefully cultivated certainties.
The supporting cast in Pam MacKinnon’s tight-reined production is also pretty much all-star. British stage luminary Lindsay Duncan is Claire, and her wonderfully ironic, fuck-you performance – a self-mocking rather than self-pitying drunk – provides most of the laughs as the increasingly chilling events unfold. Martha Plimpton’s aging gamine persona endows Julia with a regressive post-adolescent snottiness as she whines that Harry and Edna have usurped her childhood bedroom.
Bob Balaban, a recurring presence in Christopher Guest’s satirical films, is Harry, joined by Clare Higgins, another celebrated Brit, as Agnes. These two bring to their overtly symbolic roles a cringing niceness tinged with entitlement, together with a sense of real terror, and spur what could be an Albeean exercise in creepy ambiguity into a visceral drama.
In both Albee’s piece and Murray-Smith’s Nightfall, the playwrights are looking at the delicate balance between rights and responsibilities, needs and resentments, love and fear that keeps relationships going. Both plays at heart are about blood ties and social obligations, 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.”
If you’d like to be notified of future posts, email StageStruck@crocker.com
