Delicate Balance, A | Walter Kerr (review date 23 September 1966)
Walter Kerr (review date 23 September 1966)
SOURCE: A review of A Delicate Balance, in The New York Times, 23 September 1966, p. 44.
[The following negative review judges A Delicate Balance to be an empty play about hollowness and nameless dread.]
T. S. Eliot once said, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," and then he did it. In A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee talks about it and talks about it and talks about it, sometimes wittily, sometimes ruefully, sometimes truthfully. But showing might have done better.
A Delicate Balance is the sort of play that might be written if there were no theater. It exists outside itself, beside itself, aloof from itself, as detached from the hard floor of the Martin Beck, where it opened last night, as its alarmed characters are detached from themselves. The effect is deliberate—because it is precisely hollowness that is most on Mr. Albee's...
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