A DELICATE BALANCE 1973

"One is lonely, and two is boring. Think what you can keep ignoring. Side by side by side."

Stephen Sondheim    Company - 1970

Although I wanted to desperately, I didn’t see this American Film Theater production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance when it was given its brief, subscription-only theatrical run in 1973. Then, as the third filmed play in AFT’s first season, it was screened a mere four times (twice on a Monday and Tuesday at select theaters) before being withdrawn from distribution. Forever! Even network television allowed for summer re-runs, but this elite series of high-culture film releases prided itself on its now-or-never exhibition platform. A Delicate Balance was released in December of 1973, when I was 16-years-old. And while I've no doubts that I would have enjoyed this film immensely had my parents allowed me to venture out to the movies on a school night; with almost equal certainty I can say that the chances of my actually understanding what I would be watching would be close to nil. 

One's impossible, two is dreary. Three is company safe and cheery: Every Seesaw Needs a Fulcrum

I'm likely to have had an adolescent's grasp of the play's most obvious, superficial themes, especially since Albee's A Delicate Balance (like his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) dabbles in familial discord and dysfunction, both of which I’d had plenty of up-close-and-personal experience of my own to draw upon. But the sum total of my then-accumulated life experience—a conservatively-raised teenager attending Catholic boys school—would in no way have been up to the task of navigating, let alone understanding, A Delicate Balance’s bitter dissection of the kind of angst, regret, and fear one is given to encounter in the dark corners of introspection during the waning stages of middle age. I simply wouldn’t have understood what they were talking about.

When the entire 14-title AFT collection was released on DVD in 2003 and I, at last, had the opportunity to feast my eyes on this superb production, I discovered about A Delicate Balance what I had learned in later years about the Broadway musicals Company and Follies—two Stephen Sondheim “The Road You Didn’t Take” Suburban Gothics I fell in love with while a freshman in high school: the more perceptive the entertainment, the more rewarding the experience it provides once one has lived long enough to have amassed a few disappointments, broken hearts, and evenings haunted by the ghosts of forgotten dreams.

Katharine Hepburn as Agnes

Paul Scofield as Tobias

Kate Reid as Claire

Lee Remick as Julia

Joseph Cotten as Harry

Betsy Blair as Edna

On a quiet Friday evening in October, Agnes and Tobias, a chic, elderly couple living a life of comfortable (calcified?) splendor in upper-class suburban Connecticut...He, a retired businessman, she, the lady of the house and mistress of the manor; find their spacious, well-appointed home under invasion. Not from outsiders, for the “servants”: the maid, cook, and gardener well understand the proprietorial codes of conduct in regard to the invisibility of the help, and, should it arise, the silence of their insurgency. No, the invasion is from within. From within a coterie of co-dependent and emotionally-entitled friends, relations, and hangers-on who seek to avail themselves of the pacts of obligation and loyalty forged between them all over the course of forty years of marriage, affiliation, and kinship.

Agnes ponders the delicate equilibrium between stability and insanity

There’s Claire, Agnes’ alcoholic younger sister and lingering live-in houseguest; their adult daughter Julia, returning home after the failure of her fourth marriage; and, most peculiarly, lifelong friends and neighbors Harry and Edna, who show up unexpectedly seeking refuge (or permanent exile) after having been suddenly gripped by an unspecified, unnameable terror while sitting alone in their home.

Hepburn's Agnes is another of Albee’s reluctantly strong women. A ruler of the roost and matriarchal martinet who runs her house with a staunch hand only because the circumspect Tobias has abdicated his masculine duties as husband and father...and perhaps has fallen out of love with her. Maybe even fallen out of love with his life. Claire, a figure who stands both in and outside of the family at once, uses the sloppiness of her drunkenness like a battering ram against the order Agnes seeks to impose on everyone and everything. Claire, who maybe has/has not had a long-ago affair with Tobias, possesses the soothsayer's gift of having a crystal clear perception of everything but herself. She and Agnes share a relationship whose passive-aggressive dynamics would not be unfamiliar to that other sister act of dysfunction, Blanche and Baby Jane.

The Souring Side of Love

The “melancholy Julia,” 36-years-old and averaging a new marriage every three years, returns home after each break-up. A return to the figurative womb that has remained ruefully barren since the death of her younger, rarely spoken of brother Teddy when he was two.

The balance of this trio (and triennial quartet) is sustained through routine and maintained by means of evasion, avoidance, and the expediently-believed lie. It sustains itself because it must (“Blood binds us. Blood holds us together when we’ve no more deep affection for ourselves than others”) and endures long after it has ceased to serve its uncertain purpose. 

But with the arrival of Harry and Edna, Agnes and Tobias' twin counterparts—angst and inertia personified—the unquestioned obligations of blood are provoked and challenged by the presumed responsibilities of friendship.

Agnes on Men:
"Their concerns are so simple: money and death--making ends meet until they meet the end."

These individuals, each with their authentic claim on the illusory obligations of their interrelationships, converge one factious weekend under the precariously balanced roof of Agnes and Tobias. A refined, art-filled, alcohol saturated, separate-bedrooms for Mr. & Mrs. household that, while never appearing to have ever been a home, stands as such a bastion of constancy and predictability, it becomes something of a reassuring sanctuary for souls caught in the throes of existential panic.

"We haven't come to the wrong place, have we?"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My favorite kind of “action movie” tends to require no more than what a typical Eunice & Ed “The Family” sketch on the old The Carol Burnett Show comprises: a group of neurotics with interconnected relationships and barely-suppressed hostilities forced, by circumstance, to interact. Add to this the introduction of some form of unexpected, disruptive intrusion (say, becoming a contestant on The Gong Show) and before you know it, the resultant disequilibrium thrust upon them prompts the inevitably cathartic confrontation and reevaluation of all that had heretofore been strenuously avoided. The dramatization of the human condition—the struggles of ethics, identity, morality, compassion, and the need to communicate—has always been more thrilling to me than gunplay (although a handgun materializes here), car chases, and superheroes.

Those Carol Burnett skits (created by the comedy team of Dick Clair & Jenna McMahon, variety show staples during my youth) are but the comedic progeny of the dramatic Southern Gothic tradition of Tennessee Williams and William Inge. My personal predilection for these confrontational pressure-cooker confabs is evident in how often they serve as the structural basis for so many of my favorite films: Carnage, Autumn Sonata, Closer, Hot Spell, Hedda, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Practically percolating with pent-up familial tensions, A Delicate Balance is a drawing-room drama of domestic dysfunction with WASP world-weariness at its core. Indeed, watching these individuals who value order and civility above all, who treat emotions as so many dirty dishes that must be cleared away from the dinner table as quickly as possible, feels a bit like spending the weekend with the parents of Mary Tyler Moore’s character in Ordinary People.

This film adaptation of A Delicate Balance has been criticized for being visually stagnant, stagy, and talky. Perhaps, but in these inarticulate times, Albee's words serve a double purpose. They establish characters who prefer talking to actually feeling anything, and they illustrate how evocative language can be as a means of keeping intimacy at bay. From a purely personal perspective,  I relished the opportunity to see complete, unexpurgated Edward Albee performed masterfully by a brilliant cast, I can't say the film's clear theatrical origins bothered me in the least.

Theirs is a world where alcohol acts as a sort of truth serum, and chain-smoking is the means by which distress is conveyed. It’s a film bathed in the brown tones of the ‘70s, all kaftans and cocktails amidst the refined clutter of collected art. Within all this decorous emptiness are people fumbling around in search of something each is ultimately unable to give the other.

Tobias confronts the Three Tall Women

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Though it lasted but a brief two years (1973-1975), Ely Landau’s American Film Theater experiment produced an enduring (if uneven) legacy of 14 book-faithful plays filmed by acclaimed directors with once-in-a-lifetime casts.

A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play first produced on Broadway in 1966, is every bit the witty and caustic commentary on domestic dysfunction as 1962’s infinitely more popular and widely-seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. But lacking that play’s cinema-compatible sound and fury (A Delicate Balance stylistic restraint is representative of the play’s repressed, emotionally reluctant characters), and possessive of a potentially alienating metaphysical twist at the end of the first act (the appearance of the terror-stricken Harry and Edna); made A Delicate Balance’s prospects for film adaptation less than guaranteed.

Albee chose Katherine Hepburn because he noticed how good she can be in roles that don't require her to move too far from her own personality. He's right. There's not a great deal of variance between Hepburn's Agnes and Hepburn's Eleanor of Aquitaine (The Lion in Winter) or Mrs. Venable (Suddenly, Last Summer), but within the narrow confines of these characters, Hepburn shines like no other. 

Happily, A Delicate Balance was taken up by the AFT before it had a chance to fall to TV and be given one of those PBS treatments with a cast of affordable actors with the appropriate TVQ (TV-Quotient = audience recognizability)—i.e., A Delicate Balance starring Hal Holbrook, Sada Thompson, and Lindsay Wagner as Julia.

Blacklisted actress Betsy Blair,  one-time Mrs. Gene Kelly and Oscar nominee for Marty (1955), gives an understated performance that has an undertone of chilling forcefulness. 

Ely Landau’s American Film Theater selected Albee’s play for its debut season and wooed Edward Albee by offering him cast and director approval, along with the assurance that it would be a faithful filmed “translation” of his play, not a film adaptation. The distinction being that there would be no attempt to edit or “open up” the play to superficially render it any more cinematic beyond the contributions of location shooting and the subjective eye of the camera.

Albee’s first choice for director was Ingmar Bergman, who'd directed a stage production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Sweden, but he was unavailable. Academy-Award-winning director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones, A Taste of Honey) was the welcome second choice, he taking on the job chiefly to work with actress Kim Stanley (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) cast in the role of Claire. Unfortunately, Stanley was fired from the production due to her alcoholism and Method Acting eccentricities prompting a “She goes or I go!” ultimatum from Hepburn.
Edward Albee (who passed away in 2016) has cited this film as one of his favorites of the screen translations of his work. I've seen the film many times, and though I don't think it's for everyone, I consider it to be a masterwork. Despite these characters being people I really wouldn't want to spend any time around in real life, Albee's beautiful words and piercing insights connected with me on some level. In the end, I found Scofield and Hepburn to be quite moving.

Playing different ends of the provocateur spectrum, Lee Remick's displaced Julia and Kate Reid's dispossessed Claire are two of my favorite characters. Whether wallowing in self-pity or putting up a front of guarded cynicism, both actors give memorable performances.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

As one of Edward Albee’s traditionally blistering looks at the institution of family, the film’s title suggests the delicate balance of pretense, obligations, self-deceptions, betrayals, and denial of feelings required to keep a dysfunctional family functioning. It also serves as an all-purpose metaphor for what has been called the fabric of life.

With each news day reminding us how easily toppled are those institutions and principles we once felt to be rock solid (democracy, the unequivocal nature of facts, the basic decency of human beings), Albee's bracing treatise on the fragility of life and the elusiveness of the human bonds we label love, friendship, and responsibility feels troublingly relevant. 

I've only seen the magnificent Paul Scofield in two films: 1990's Hamlet and his 1966 Best Actor Oscar-winning A Man For All Seasons. He is astoundingly good here. Especially in his bravura Act III scene with the always welcome (and solid) Joseph Cotten

I will soon pass the threshold of my sixth decade, and yet it never ceases to amaze me how closely insight and absolute terror co-exist. Fear becomes easier to handle as I grow older, for one does learn (intellectually if not always emotionally) that there is little worth being afraid of. But terror, which I define as a kind of unfocused dread, often comes out of nowhere and hits at unexpected times as one ages. Most powerfully in the form referenced frequently in the film: the terror that “time happens” while one is going about the meaningless business of self-distraction, self-medication, amassing material objects, and trying to avoid feeling too deeply about anything—seeking a life of no mountains or chasms; only to arrive at a moment when everything becomes “too late.”

Too late to read those books you always promised you'd make time for. Too late to learn that language. Too late to make amends. Too late to develop a soul after a lifetime of moral compromise. Too late to be loving after a lifetime of self-insulating. Too late to see that change is always a possibility with the acknowledgment that bravery, while always a necessity, doesn't come with a guarantee of a win. It merely keeps the doors open. And without those doors, there can be no sunlight, and without sunlight, there can be no new day or second chances. Only chaos and the dark side of reason.

BONUS MATERIAL

Edward Albee interview on the making of A Delicate Balance HERE

Betsy Blair interview on the making of A Delicate Balance    HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018