“A Delicate Balance” Guthrie Theater
Earlier in the month, I got carried away by a special the Guthrie theater was offering, and bought tickets not only to the two plays I was interested in–Henry V and Two Gentlemen of Verona–but also to Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. This last was a mistake.
A tale of tension and anxiety in WASPy suburbs of the mid-sixties, the play’s slow pace was worsened by two intermissions. The set was beautiful, though, and I especially liked the splatter painting at its center, a hint of the chaos that underlies the delicate balance of the title. The individual performances were uniformly good (though I found Candy Buckley as Claire looked distractingly like my sister Sydney), but were overwhelmed by the overlong play. It so lost its tension by the end that I wondered less about the characters than about why I’d spent time and money to watch them.
Other reviews: TCDaily, Examiner, Star Tribune
January 26th, 2009 at 11:30 am
You MEANT to say, “looked distractingly like my sister Sydney in about 20 years” right?
January 26th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Um, of course I did. But she looked fab up on stage–from the audience, she looked ageless–could have been anything from 30s on up. That’s why it was so distracting. But yes, both her character and the actress have at least one, if not two, decades on you.