A DELICATE BALANCE
—A Non-reconsideration
My mind is going, I suspect; I have no idea how long I’ve known most of my friends; the names of most people are beyond me, and I cannot recall the emotional or physical experience of the writing of most of my plays, or how long ago the experience I cannot recall occurred.
The only senses I fully retain—and very sharply these—are picture images and sounds. Hearing two bars of almost any piece of serious music has me naming the composer, the piece, and often the date of composition and opus number—or K., or Hoboken, or whatever. Seeing a painting for a second time—in a new context, of course—has me instantly recalling on what wall it hung, in what room, in what country, when I saw it first.
But names and events … that’s another matter. Once I looked straight at my mother and couldn’t figure out who she was. (Well, I guess we’ve all had that one!)
So … is it really thirty years since the first production of A Delicate Balance? It seems like yesterday, as they say? No, certainly not … but thirty years?
The play has not changed; that I can see. I’ve had to rewrite only two lines—making it clear that topless bathing suits (for women, of course) are not made anymore, and changing “our dear Republicans as dull as ever” to “as brutal as ever” (that second change long overdue).
The play does not seem to have “dated”; rather, its points seem clearer now to more people than they were in its lovely first production. Now, in its lovely new production (I will not say “revival”; the thing was not dead—unseen, unheard perhaps, but lurking), it seems to me exactly the same experience. No time has passed; the characters have not aged or become strange. (The upper-upper middle-class WASP culture has always been just a little bizarre, of course.)
The play concerns—as it always has, in spite of early-on critical misunderstanding—the rigidity and ultimate paralysis which afflicts those who settle in too easily, waking up one day to discover that all the choices they have avoided no longer give them any freedom of choice, and that what choices they do have left are beside the point.
I have become odder with time, I suppose (my next play but one will be about a goat, for God’s sake), but A Delicate Balance, bless it, does not seem to have changed much—aged nicely, perhaps. Could we all say the same.
—Edward Albee
Montauk, N.Y.
August 1996