Pretty Crowded for an Empty Nest
Ben BrantleyNovember 20, 2014: Hope arrives in the form of dread toward the end of the first act of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, which opened on Thursday night in a revival at the Golden Theater. Up to that point in this production, directed by Pam MacKinnon, it’s been hard to detect much feeling of any kind within the carefully color-coordinated, dust-free, energy-free environs that have been installed onstage. To be sure, the three talented and celebrated people we have been watching up there thus far — Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Lindsay Duncan — have been delivering their characters’ zingers and stingers with crispness, clarity and, when one feels an important theme coming on, heavy italics. Yet they have the distant, flattened dimensions of specimens under glass. You feel that if you left them for a while, when you returned, they’d still be more or less frozen as they were before. But then — oh, sweet deliverance — here come good old, miserable, intrusive Harry and Edna to shake things up. They’re the best friends of Tobias and Agnes (Mr. Lithgow and Ms. Close), the owners of the tasteful mausoleum for the living (i.e., lovely suburban home) that is the setting for Mr. Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of 1966.
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