A kind of Hell 2nd Story strikes a masterful Balance BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	ADelicate Balance By Edward Albee. Directed by Ed Shea. With Lynne Collinson, Rip Irving, Alyn Carlson-Webster, Joan Batting, Walter Cotter, and Jen Swain. At 2nd Story Theatre through October 26.

The film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has locked itself into our collective cultural consciousness, epitomizing marital and social life as jungle warfare. But it was the other play that Edward Albee staged in 1966, A Delicate Balance, that grabbed his first Pulitzer for drama, and for good reason.

The play is more deeply affecting, while the equally snarling Virginia Woolf has more of its metaphorical bloodshed displayed on the surface. The two hours of Delicate Balance are broken into three short acts, like gasps.

Beginning a season of five full-length plays, 2nd Story Theatre has hit the stage running with this production. It is perhaps the most ambitious one on the bill, yet they manage to accomplish it quite well.

The first balance threatened, and representing everything else that can topple, is the very mental stability of Agnes (Lynne Collinson). Small wonder: she has to cope with a sniping live-in alcoholic sister, an adult daughter with felony-level arrested development, and a best-friends couple about to arrive with enough existential baggage to crack their terrazzo foyer.

In this milieu of wealth and privilege, within Manhattan commuting distance, conversation is lubricated by liquor and improbable articulation skills — more of both than in a screwball comedy retrospective. Albee sets up three characters as gabby and glib, then winds them up and watches them go.

As the play opens, Agnes is casually discussing with her husband how she senses "a gentle loosening of the mooring" that could very well send her mind adrift. We wonder how seriously to take this, whether this is mere cocktail banter. We soon learn how grave her concern is, though we see that this steely, determined matriarch could keep a skittering hand grenade together through sheer force of will. (Albee won his third Pulitzer in 1991 for Three Tall Women, an elaboration on the influence of strong females in his upbringing.)

What teeters at risk is not just her well-being or even that of her family members. No less than the very structures of family, the wife-husband relationship, the nature of friendship and, thereby, social existence itself are at stake, the playwright wants to convince us.

The 2nd Story ensemble does just that with skill and restraint; there are large emotions at play here that sometimes chill us deeper when just glimpsed. As Collinson softens Agnes’s steely determination now and then, so too Rip Irving as her placid husband Tobias shows firm strength of character when that is called upon at the end — we watch along with him as he learns the sort of human being he is.

Drunken sister Claire is played more boastfully than stridently by Alyn Carlson-Webster, a wise idea since she, as her name suggests, is the clear-sighted observer here. Trickier in this regard is daughter Julia (Jen Swain), who at 33 comes home after failing her fourth marriage, to pout and throw tantrums like an adolescent. Under the direction of Ed Shea, Swain goes flat-out apoplectic in these scenes which works perfectly, since Julia’s purpose in the play is all about losing control in the larger sense.

What drives Julia over the edge is the arrival of her parents’ best friends, Edna and Harry, like a prodigal Goldilocks finding bears in her bedroom. Joan Batting and Walter Cotter make them real to us, understating the terror they feel at the end of middle age. There they were after supper, she doing her needlework, he practicing his French, when they were stricken with a nameless dread. Albee was brilliant to have their plight be existentially abstract rather than pinned to some specific, thus addressable, trauma. Oblivious of boundary issues, Agnes’s and Tobias’s "best friends in the whole world" have come to move in.

Marvelous. As Sartre whined: "Hell is others." In this context, when Agnes in Act Two referred in passing to "this reasonably happy family," Collinson chilled me to the core. Since Albee unavoidably had in mind Tolstoy’s dictum that all happy families are the same, this was as much as the playwright stating that such interpersonal horrors are our lot in life. "We’re not a communal nation, dear," Claire declares to Julia, not lamenting, just admitting. In the face of this, for Tobias to agree to permanently take in Edna and Harry would be a monumental decision. Is friendship boundless? He once had a pet cat killed by a vet, he admits, because it lost affection for him.

There is something prescient here for a gay playwright writing in the 1960s, two decades before the AIDS epidemic, and countless instances of relationships abandoned because of the disease. Agnes says to Tobias that their needy friends "have brought the plague." Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ends with a lull and resignation, indicating that the battle is bound to resume. A Delicate Balance ends with an affirmation of sorts. No moralizing dictum, just a reminder that since existence precedes essence, as Sartre maintained, others can be merely purgatory, if we choose.