As you may have surmised by the title of this post, I am not an Edward Albee fan girl. I feel weirdly guilty about it, especially since he's dead. I feel like I HAVE to adore his work, and I do really like Three Tall Women (still bummed I didn't see the recent revival) and definitely appreciate the magnitude of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but for whatever reason I've just never had the ardent respect and admiration of Albee that I've felt towards Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, for example. I blame too early an exposure to his Pulitzer Prize winning play Seascape, which was much too avant garde for high school Stephanie.
So when I read A Delicate Balance I didn't know what to expect. Even though it is also a Pulitzer Prize winner (one of three [almost four] for Albee), I had honestly never heard of it before I was asked to dramaturg a reading of it this coming weekend. Of course I said yes because I (a) am incapable of saying no and (b) am not in a position to say no to any theatrical endeavors. So, I checked the play out from the library and jumped into reading it without so much as reading the description on the back of the book. Where to begin? Well, the play takes place in "the living room of a large and well-appointed suburban house. Now." First of all, LOVE a good assertion of timelessness in the setting. Very pretentious, but I'm here for it. I feel like nowadays we love looking at older plays and being like, "Wow, this could have been written today!" But in 1966 Albee was like, "I'm gonna write a play and forever and ever people are gonna produce it and say, 'Wow, this could have been written today!'" The suburban house belongs to Tobias and Agnes, a wealthy middle-aged couple. Agnes' alcoholic sister Claire lives with them and on the evening of the play's events they are joined by their daughter Julia, newly separated from her fourth husband, and their best friends Harry and Edna, who show up unannounced after having been gripped by terror in their own home. In true Albee fashion, the rest of the play is the five of them getting drunk and being horrible to each other. It's very well-written rich people getting drunk and being horrible to each other though! After reading the play I proceeded to actually read the description on the back as well as some critical responses, and this is where I learned that the play is described as a "dark comedy?!?!?!?" I assumed Claire was a funny role because she was played by Elaine Stritch in the '96 Lincoln Center production, but based solely on a read and not having heard it out loud yet (rehearsal for the reading is in a few days), this play is not funny. It's definitely a downer. Side note: in college we read 'night mother, famous for being INCREDIBLY depressing, and one of my friends brought up in the class discussion that he thought it was a comedy and when literally the entire class disagreed he was like, "I assume all plays are comedies until proven otherwise." Is that how anyone else on the planet reads plays? I feel like I assume all plays aren't comedies unless proven otherwise. Including comedies. BACK TO THE PLAY: It's not super plot heavy so I don't feel the need to comment on the events of the play, but aside from the given circumstances of implied ~timelessness~ I was really intrigued by Albee's use of stage directions. I know, Stephanie loves stage directions, what else is new, but really, he uses them in a very specific way in this text. He doesn't include many large chunks of stage direction describing setting or the grand sense of the play but almost every single line of dialogue has an acting note on delivery or physicality. Some examples are "quiet despair," "surprised delight," "slight schoolteacher tone," or "the way a nurse speaks to a disturbed patient." Before Tobias' climactic Act III monologue, in which he begs Harry and Edna not to leave their home even though everyone else wants them to, Albee interjects stage directions liberally through out the piece, and begins the monologue with the following note: "This next is an aria. It must have in its performance all the horror and exuberance of a man who has kept his emotions under control too long. Tobias will be carried to the edge of hysteria, and he will find himself laughing, sometimes, while he cries from sheer release. All in all, it is genuine and bravura at the same time, one prolonging the other. I shall try to notate it somewhat." I love that he calls the passage an aria instead of a monologue. The whole play has a musical quality to it, with Albee's inclusion of deliberate pauses and pacing notes, and this monologue seems to be conducted by Albee. He also doesn't remove himself as the author from the piece. While I was reading the sentence "I shall try to notate it somewhat" I think my jaw dropped a little bit because I've rarely seen a playwright basically write the sentence "This is my authorial intent and you will stick to it" even if it is how they feel. I kind of love it. At the same time it makes me sad because the characters in this play are based on actual members of Albee's adopted family, so it's safe to say he's conducting these monologues from a place of lived experience. Considering the play is about a bunch of rich alcoholics who are horrible to each other and also deals with some of Albee's other favorite topics, like losing a baby and adultery, that's pretty depressing. What is it they say? Difficult childhoods make great playwrights? I just googled it and apparently it was Ernest Hemingway who called an unhappy childhood the best early training for a writer. Anyway, I could go on and on about the characters and their misery, but I don't really want to, and since this is my blog that no one reads, I also don't have to. But I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on A Delicate Balance. If you enjoy stories about how fucked up rich people's lives are, give it a read! Personally, I'm pretty grateful that the rich white people living room drama is not one of the chosen narratives of contemporary theatre, cause it's already been done, it's been done really well, and now I'd rather spend my time reading about other types of people. Which reminds me! I said I was gonna read Torch Song Trilogy. I read the first two plays and haven't gotten around to the third yet, but I'll do it eventually, and when I do there will be a blog post about it! Thanks for making it to the end, friends.
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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