| Subtopic: A Delicate Balance, glorious as it is, is best not updated | |
| Last Edit: Delvino 08:05 am EDT 05/29/24 | |
| Posted by: Delvino 08:01 am EDT 05/29/24 | |
| In reply to: I long considered Delicate Balance the best American play of the 20th century - aleck 09:25 pm EDT 05/27/24 | |
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| I'll briefly re-open the debate that ensued after that ill-conceived last revival. A Delicate Balance cannot comfortably be updated to the present, to turn Agnes, Tobias, Harry, Edna, and Claire into boomers. The material simply doesn't track with the era: "Canasta party" and "the Saturday night dance" at "the club" are midcentury markers for niche suburban ennui, appropriately tethered to a generation born circa 1901-1905, when the play was first produced. Agnes frets about servants, about not knowing how to make coffee, countless details that don't line up with my generation, regardless of class. Harry and Tobias would have had at least peripheral involvement in Vietnam rather than WWII or Korea, and be metabolically changed by its impact, either by deferrals or lottery participation. Tobias's lines about marijuana and teen "nests" in the neighborhood simply don't logically emerge from the mouths of folks born circa 1949-1952, the ages of the actors who were teens in the 60s. The revival dressed Claire in post-hippie cosplay, a ludicrous update on a character who would've been the dreaded dyspeptic bon vivant at Updike-ish cocktail parties of the fifties. Beads, fringe and natural fabrics? On a woman talking about a one piece bathing suit? It all collapses. It's not a weakness of the play that it doesn't update, but the play's capture of wealth and privilege ebbs when boomers are made to behave like their parents (I have this same complaint about Joanne in Company, who bears no resemblance to any women I know who are my age and Joanne's.) A post-millennial Delicate Balance also invites us to examine the 36-year-old Julia anew, a young woman who would've been born '79-'80. Would've attended college or have a reason not to. Yet she's a specific young woman originally born in 1930. In no universe is a woman born in '30 the same human being as one born in '80. This may be nitpicky, but the play is a beautiful, accurate illustration of the generation that raised young Edward Albee, their trappings, their crises. It's not less of a drama for its inability to be repurposed and affixed to characters with a different role in the culture and our history. I say, stage it not as a period piece, but with the timelessness required to let us skip all of the observations I make in this post. |
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| Previous: | I long considered Delicate Balance the best American play of the 20th century - aleck 09:25 pm EDT 05/27/24 |
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