An Albee Revival Tries Again

Everybody knows Edward Albee’s ho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Not so A Delicate Balance, which came along four years later, in 1966, and failed to make the same culture-shifting stir. Though it won the Pulitzer Prize that Virginia Woolf absurdly failed to nail, the first production ran for only 132 performances, and the 1996 Broadway revival, despite glowing reviews, didn’t do much better. While A Delicate Balance is now seen regionally with some regularity, I doubt it would have returned to Broadway for a third try were it not for Glenn Close, who was last seen there 20 years ago and whose inclusion in the cast is making it—at last—a very hot ticket indeed. Aside from Ms. Close’s presence, what has changed about A Delicate Balance in the intervening half-century is that its author has metamorphosed from American theater’s angry young man into its grumpy elder statesman. In between he was seen as a back number, a writer of eccentric, sometimes impenetrable plays who after Virginia Woolf couldn’t get a good review to save his life. At length the critical tide turned, but Mr. Albee is still what he always was, a wildly uneven author whose worst plays are so bad that it hardly seems possible that they were written by the same man who gave us the best ones. Where does A Delicate Balance fall on that spectrum? At its best, it’s thought-provoking and sometimes challenging, but it takes a long time to get moving, and I wonder whether modern-day audiences will be willing to wait for it.