Elden Street's 'Delicate Balance' Brings a Chilly Start to Summer

Why does it feel that Elden Street Players have dusted off a museum piece with their airless production of Edward Albee's 1966 family drama, "A Delicate Balance," his first Pulitzer Prize winner?

It is a challenging play to produce and to sit through. The play is supposedly a painstaking dissection of family life in which people wallow in their limitations and regrets. But even if the dialogue seems mannered and stiff here, it does possess a timeless quality and could be as relevant now as it seemed to be four decades ago. In fact, a dark and formless fear that strikes two of the characters should resonate in an era when the government issues terror alerts and Americans seem willing to cede basic rights in response. Still, despite fine individual performances, the play never quite comes alive nor speaks in a convincing manner.

The characters seem frozen in time, as do their emotions. In 1966, "A Delicate Balance" was heralded as a template for exploring dysfunction in modern American families. The characters create turmoil and angst as they try to dodge the nuisance of intimacy and mourn lives that have not been fully lived. But, as directed here by Emme Lundeen Fallen, it seems less a tale of family relationships and more a postmortem of the dying WASP ruling class.

Albee boasted during a 1996 Broadway revival that he had only to change a few sentences to update the play. Yet this production is saturated in a moldering atmosphere of old-fashioned aristocratic smugness.

The extremely well-detailed, upper-class home interior displays nothing to indicate a specific time; it could be any year of the last five decades. The opulent setting, the prominent social affectations, the classic formal dress, the polite smiles obscuring fangs and the characters' advancing ages are more about people clinging to a decaying societal structure than a look at one family's pathology.

A sense of immediacy is sacrificed at the altar of gilded atmosphere. It's not the director's fault, but the ridiculously constant, dawn-to-wee-small-hours mixing and consuming of cocktails makes one wonder what these folks would be like sober.

Linda High and Al Fetske are Agnes and Tobias, an older, married couple. High makes Agnes ostensibly dominant in the relationship, playing the character with a formality and brittleness that underline her loneliness.

Fetske plays the refined and aloof Tobias with a half-smile and a twinkle in his eye that suggests lots of passive aggression. The reserve between them is frosty, despite outward geniality. Mollie Wise is an understated Claire, Agnes's live-in, alcoholic sister, and she misses the chance to provide color and energy but shows hints of the rapier-tongued woman's frustrated bitterness.

Carla Scopeletis and Jack Seeley perfectly portray the traumatized couple Edna and Harry, who flee their home in unexplained terror and assume they can just move into their friends' abode. This becomes a test for Agnes and Tobias, but not of family or friendship. Rather, it analyzes whether members of the gentry have a responsibility to take care of one another in the face of whatever creeping menace threatens them. Laura Russell nicely serves up a shrill and immature Julia, the 36-year-old daughter who is home following another failed marriage (her fourth).

Fetske also designed the superbly sumptuous and realistic set. It's a three-dimensional place that is painstakingly appointed with ever-so-tasteful furnishings that seem selected by the same manicured hand.

The cast moves adroitly through a weekend of the characters' lives in about three hours, which may be too much for some theatergoers. I counted six abandoned seats in my row following the first intermission Saturday night.

"A Delicate Balance" continues through June 30, performed by Elden Street Players at Industrial Strength Theatre, 269 Sunset Park Dr., Herndon. Showtime is 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 7 p.m. June 24. For reservations, call 703-481-5930. For information, visithttp://www.eldenstreetplayers.org.