Myfavorite American play is Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
A close second is Albee’s other masterpiece, “A Delicate Balance,” which premiered on Broadway in 1966.
So I’m pleased to report that a revival is in the works for next season. And the word on the street is that Glenn Close will be the star.
Details are sketchy. In fact, I’m not even sure which part Close is playing, though I suspect it will be Claire, one of Albee’s brittle, sharp-tongued alcoholics.
She has that chilling speech about leaving AA: “I never was, nor never would be, a alcoholic. Or an. What I didn’t have in common with them: They were alcoholics; I am a drunk.”
Elaine Stritch gave an unforgettable, and Tony-
nominated, performance in a 1996 Lincoln Center revival. That was one of the best productions I’ve ever seen. It was directed with elegance and viciousness by the late Gerald Gutierrez, and won the Tony that year for Best Revival of a Play. George Grizzard won the Tony for his performance as Tobias, and Rosemary Harris was nominated for her performance as the cold, sarcastic, emotionally brutal Agnes.
I hear Simon McBurney is directing the revival, to be produced by Scott Rudin. Gutierrez’s production will be a tough act to follow, but McBurney’s turned in some first-rate work with his theater company, Complicite: “Mnemonic” and “The Elephant Vanishes.”
Written after Albee shot to fame with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “A Delicate Balance” is modeled on those elegant drawing-room plays of Somerset Maugham and S.N. Behrman. But, this being Albee, the elegant drawing room is a cage in which the well-heeled characters claw the marrow out of one another.
Some critics were puzzled by the play the first time around. It did win the Pulitzer Prize, but many said that was because “Virginia Woolf” did not.
But “A Delicate Balance” has stood the test of time, as the 1996 revival proved, and its portrait of the cloistered rich is as timely as ever.
As far as I can tell, Close has never been in an Albee play. But with her lean, WASP-ish looks, she’s an Albee actress if ever there was one.
She hasn’t been in a major Broadway show since her Tony-winning turn as Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1994 “Sunset Boulevard.”
It’ll be good to have her back.
‘A Delicate Balance” happened to be critic Jacques le Sourd’s favorite play.
And if you knew him, that should be no surprise.
He was dapper, in his Hermès ties and blue cashmere blazers, he mixed a mean martini, and he certainly could annihilate an adversary with an Albee-esque zinger.
Once, at a meeting of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Adam Feldman, from Time Out, accused him of leaking information to me about the Circle.
Jacques leaned across the table and replied: “Tell me, Adam. Is that dye you use in your hair Duchess of Windsor black?”
(Poor old Feldman ran around for days showing off his roots to disprove the charge.)
Jacques died of a quick, massive heart attack earlier this month. He was my friend for 25 years, and I know I’m going to miss him every day for the rest of my life.
You’d have to be Balzac to do justice to him as a character.
All I can do is leave you with this anecdote, one of many “anti-dotes,” as he called them, about himself.
Running late for the opera one night, he hailed a cab and got stuck in traffic. The driver, a Muslim, was accompanied up front by his wife.
Jacques banged on the plastic divider and said: “My name is Jessye Norman. I am performing tonight at the Metropolitan Opera, and it is your responsibility to get me there by 8 o’clock.”
The driver said: “Oh, Mr. Norman! My wife and I are big fans!”
He later told me: “Riedel, they practically got out a siren to get me there on time.”
He gave them a big, fat tip, of course — and his autograph:
“Thanks for the lift, Jessye.”