Review: A fine balance of tension, subtlety

Is a lukewarm truce with life the best we can hope for in our advancing years -- plodding forward and hoping that occasionally we capture a feeling? Edward Albee puts this tenuous proposition before us in his Pulitzer-winning "A Delicate Balance," a piece of subtlety that tests patience and tolerance for the greater part of a performance. It opened Friday at the Guthrie Proscenium Stage under Gary Gisselman's direction.

Albee throws out these players: a WASP-y couple in co-dependent bliss, their spoiled daughter, her alcoholic sister and two friends who are scared witless. Set designer John Arnone's gorgeous arched living room indicates that everyone is rich, though that attribute counts no more than the fact that everyone drinks. What rides underneath matters.

As Albee clears this throat in the first two acts, he maintains a cool distance in the meandering conversation among Tobias (Raye Birk) and Agnes (Margaret Daly). She is precise in her language to a fault, he avoids conflict. Claire (Candy Buckley) is caught in the arrested stage of alcoholism and Julia (Charity Jones) is the spoiled daughter who has returned home after her fourth marital explosion. Harry (Stephen Yoakam) and Edna (Angela Timberman) are best friends of Tobias and Agnes and they stop by after experiencing an unnamed terror in their home. They want to move in.

Albee's rhythm is flawless, yet he constantly diverts the heat into side alleys -- never settling for mere entertainment but nodding to drawing room comedy. Gisselman plays along, spinning out this loose series of events and pronouncements in a melange of poetic banality. The whimsy of unreality -- in Harry and Edna -- invites inquiry even as we stand back unaffected by what feels to be artifice. Never does it grab us by the throat.

And then Albee's genius sneaks up on us in an unconscious and flawless gathering of disparate threads into tightly woven fabric. After puzzling for the better part of 90 minutes over where the play resides, it hits us. It is in the withdrawal of characters from each other; it is in the sense of feeling trapped by the relentless momentum of each day, the suffocating reality of every sunrise; the brutal and unforgiving march of time that promises a solitude in life's end that we cannot fathom.

Each character resists in his or her own way, and each fails. Birk spills out Tobias' aria -- the primal howl of man spiritually exhausted and unhinged in his attempt to convince himself that he loves Harry as a friend. Jones pouts and screams as Julia, who just can't leave home. Buckley might be better as a scourge than a jester but booze has left Claire a stunted cynic.

And Harry and Edna? The terror they flee is a house occupied by only themselves. As Timberman's Edna says in a moment of self realization, "The only skin you've ever known is your own, and it's not warm. It's cold and dry."

Give it time and this finely wrought production will catch up with you.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299