[The essay below examines A Delicate Balance's characters, "who, for all their symbolic resonances, are so disturbingly real in their ability to repel as well as arouse sympathy."]

Time happens, I suppose. To people. Everything becomes too late, finally. You know it's going on … up on the hill; and you can see the dust, and hear the cries, and the steel … but you wait; and time happens. When you do go, sword, shield … finally … there's nothing there … save rust; bones; and the wind.¹

In A Delicate Balance, a drama about marriage and aging, there is little shouting and no breaking of bottles—just a modicum of hysterics. In fact, decorum and propriety are the rules of the game in this play which takes place during a fall weekend in the living room of a retired business man, Tobias, and of his wife, Agnes. The equilibrium of the household which includes Agnes' sister Claire is irrevocably shaken by the simultaneous invasion of daughter Julia in flight from her fourth marriage debacle and "best friends" Harry and Edna in quest of a solution to their first one. Albee further explores what George sadly describes to Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as the "accommodation, malleability and adjustment" of life, and he investigates the proposition that the older people get the fewer choices they have when it comes to changing the pattern of their lives. Again, after confrontation and emotional crisis awareness grows. At the end of the play, the doors to six cages are left ajar.

After a busy and remunerative career in the city, Tobias has retired to the suburbs to enjoy the fruits of his success. He employs a gardener and several other servants and belongs to a country club where he plays golf. There is a conservatory with potted palms in his well-appointed home. His living room is adorned with crystal chandeliers and shelves filled with leather-bound books. He is "proud of his wines" and reads Horizon magazine. To all appearances Tobias is a man who has been an excellent provider. Agnes, who takes herself very seriously, is the model spouse. She has borne two children, "runs the house … makes sure there's food and not just anything, and decent linen; looks well; assumes whatever duties are demanded", and organizes her life around her husband's wishes. She finds herself, defines herself in the role of wife and mother. Feelings of unreality and abstraction were immediately suggested in the original New York production by a set in which everything solid was recessed and seemed to be slipping off into the shadows.² The false air of superiority the superficial and harmony tween this husband and wife who practice concealment of emotion as if it were a virtue are in fact dangerously close to disruption at the moment the curtain rises. In the course of a weekend Tobias will be compelled to face the truth about himself as a husband, as a father and as a friend.

When the play begins the couple are getting ready to drink a cordial after their Friday evening meal but the atmosphere between them is anything but warm and cozy. In his review of the premier performance, Walter Kerr describes Tobias with his fingers clenched, an expression of worry and near exasperation on his face, and Agnes smoothing down "the grey serenity of her utterly unwrinkled dress, speaking quickly". 3 There has just been an ugly scene at dinner. Claire, the family dependent, came to the table unsteady, unintelligible and smelling of vodka one time too many. Sharp and scolding, "neither less nor more than human", Agnes let forth with what she later describes as "not brutality at all, but the souring side of love" and Claire has temporarily withdrawn to her room upstairs. Determinedly Agnes says to Tobias, "All the years we have put up with each other's wiles and crotchets have earned us each other's company". A little later, when the news that their thirty-six year old daughter Julia is about to return home from her fourth marriage has doubled her after-dinner pique, Agnes adds wearily, "I have reached an age Tobias, when I wish we were always alone, you and I, without … hangers-on … or anyone".

A recurring critical misunderstanding of the play and in particular of the character of Agnes is that this woman is literally threatened with insanity 4 and that she really wants to go mad. 5 On the contrary, as Tobias remarks, "There is no saner woman on earth". In her long-winded opening monologue Agnes tells Tobias precisely why she is angry:

What I find most astonishing—aside from that belief of mine, which never ceases to surprise me by the very fact of its surprising lack of unpleasantness, the belief that I might very easily—as they say—lose my mind one day——is Claire.

The perpetual presence—in or near the household—of the alcoholic sister, who is after all a parasite, a meddler, and a burden, has grated on the nerves of Agnes to the point where, as she contemplates the few remaining years of her married life, the situation is becoming mentally and physically unlivable. It is Claire's cumulative effect plus Tobias' reflex defence of everything she does which provokes her that night after dinner to indulge herself in a rambling reflection on the subject of "drifting-off". However, she also says, "Not that I suspect I am about to, or am even … nearby … for I'm not that sort". It is against Agnes' nature to be uninvolved with people, uncaring or detached. The woman is attracting attention to her unhappiness.

There is no evidence in the play to justify E.G. Bierhaus' accusation that Agnes is isolationist and selfish because she wants to be alone with her husband in their retirement.⁶ There has been a deep and private sorrow between this man and woman, an emotional estrangement of many years. According to her lights Agnes has loved long and faithfully—most of the time knowing she was being taken for granted. Her craving for an opportunity for Tobias and herself to find each other again before they die hardly earns her the epithet "domineering, man-eating, she-ogre of the American family".⁷ Tobias has recently undergone serious internal surgery. Expecting to be alone soon, "abandoned by a heart attack or cancer", preparing for that, Agnes would like to round things out with her husband before it is all over. As their friend Harry puts it on Sunday morning, "There's … so much … over the dam, so many … disappointments, evasions, I guess, lies maybe … so much we remember we wanted once … so little that we've settled for". Agnes does not wish for anything as grand as an apotheosis but she would like to have peace in her home in her old age.

It is during the weekend when the action of the play takes place that the opportunity presents itself for Agnes and Tobias to get closer to each other. Although not altogether in privacy and solitude, they do make a start at breaking through "the demise of intensity, the private preoccupations, the substitutions" of the years between the beginning of it all and the end. The balance that was teetering on Friday night after the outburst at the dinner table and the news of Julia's fourth marriage disaster is severely jostled by bedtime when, near the end of Act One, Harry and Edna (who are very much like Agnes and Tobias) unexpectedly arrive. Refugees from their own loneliness and loss, they come looking for the warmth and the sense of belonging which they have failed to create between themselves in their marriage. The next evening, with Julia demanding her room, Claire providing provocative sideline commentary and their life-long friends emphatically invading the premises with piles of luggage, an explosion of suppressed emotional energy shatters the outward calm of the family. Agnes overcomes her natural reserve, her deference to Tobias' ambivalence, and states a preference. She finally compels him to acknowledge the truth about their marriage arrangement and to face the implications involved for all of them in their dilemma of the full house. By Sunday morning, after the pieces have fallen back into place, the patterns of these six lives have not been radically altered. It is too late for that. However, their emotional relationships are unequivocally improved. Humbled—all, they find that the way to a more affectionate and goodhumored harmony has been prepared for what remains of their lives together.

In A Delicate Balance the illusion that there is freedom of choice after a certain time is destroyed. As Albee puts it, "The point of the play (is) that we lose … we develop a kind of arthritis of the mind, of the morality, and change becomes impossible finally——not whether we live up to our responsibilities of friendship".⁸ On the whole, in spite of the tone of gentleness, compassion and warm—if often barbed—humor with which the author depicts the characters, critical response to them is hostile. For example, Anne Paolucci finds them "grasping and vicious, and even naive at the beginning", and says that "they all end up damned".⁹ John Gassner feels that the play resolves nothing. "It is altogether vacuous, as a result of the fuzzy failure of Agnes and Tobias as either separate individuals or as a married couple."¹⁰ Ronald Hayman's view is that "when Harry and Edna go, leaving the other four together, we have no clear picture of what has been changed by the incidents of the weekend".¹¹ Happily, in his discussion of this play C.W.E. Bigsby recognizes that, "Albee is concerned with locating the source of a limited but genuine hope" and that A Delicate Balance is another "calling for … a courageous determination to face the world as it is".¹² However, even Bigsby betrays the unwillingness of most of the critics to feel comfortable with characters who, for all their symbolic resonances, are so disturbingly real in their ability to repeal as well as to arouse sympathy.

In Albee's plays there are no heroes. His characters are never pleasant projections of wishful thinking. They do not present life as it should be or even could be but as it all too often is, whether people like to admit it or not. The seriousness under the jokes, the sadness and the wistfulness that permeate this play arise from the author's consciousness of the pitiful inability of so many people—for whatever good reasons—to respond adequately to all the demands of a lifetime, as well as from his painful awareness that sometimes people need to hurt each other in order to survive.

The mixed feelings of irritation and sympathy which Agnes arouses are very different from the emotional response which Martha provokes in Virginia Woolf. Martha, after all, does not take any interest in homemaking or in her husband and misses no opportunity to denigrate George and his work. Agnes is a very different woman. Having accepted the male role as primary she let her destiny be controlled by Tobias. Over the years, in her role as adjunct, she developed a formidable self-image. A lack of a sense of her own worth is not Agnes' problem. "I must discover sometime who you think you are", snaps Julia on Saturday evening after another unpleasant dinner. Icily, Agnes replies, "You will learn … one day".

Agnes married a man who provided well for her and the family. On that score she has no complaints: "It is a rolling, pleasant land … verdant, my darling, thank you." She has borne children, although there is some question in her mind whether she considers motherhood the normative experience which has defined the value of her life: "Blessing? Yes, I suppose, even with the sadness." Unlike Mommy and Martha, Agnes did not marry primarily for what the man would make her in the eyes of others; she joined her lot with Tobias for love—for better or for worse. In her capacity of wife and mother she competently took charge of her domain:

When we keep something in shape we maintain its shape—whether we are proud of that shape, or not, is another matter—we keep it from falling apart. We do not attempt the impossible. We maintain. We hold.

As she approaches sixty Agnes' grief is that the shape she has struggled to hold together resounds with hollowness. She has, after all, not been alone for all the years. She has a partner who did very little to share in the arrangement beyond providing the home and the material goods for his wife to organize. Agnes' fault is not unlike the fault of George in Virginia Woolf; she has been kind and understanding too long and let things go beyond what her judgement told her was good and right. It is she who says, "I am the one member of this … reasonably happy family blessed and burdened with the ability to view a situation objectively while I am in it——The double position of seeing not only facts but their implications … the longer view as well as the shorter". Yet, up to this weekend, her dedication to her life as adjunct and her devotion to her husband's will have unwittingly worked against the best interests of the whole family. When Tobias says, "You who make all the decisions, really rule the game", Agnes points out, "That is an illusion you have". She continues:

The reins we hold! It's a team of twenty horses, and we sit there, and we watch the road and check the leather … if our man is so disposed. But there are things we do not do … we don't decide the route … We follow. We let our … men decide the moral issues.

At last she makes him see that directly or indirectly he himself helped to bring them all to the Friday night after-dinner-malaise, the state Jerry describes in The Zoo Story: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other."

Something in the past was concealed between this husband and wife, something which Agnes allowed to be left unresolved and which still has a ruinous effect on the present. Like Jerry and like George, Agnes learns that "neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves", that "the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion". Much as Agnes makes Tobias face the truth about their lives together, she also has to admit that she herself waited too long to do something about it and that, in effect, she let Tobias make her unhappy and—up to this weekend—stood silently by while he reinforced his daughter's feeling of being unloved time and time again. The difficult and painful confrontation which Agnes forces on Tobias on Sunday morning at the beginning of Act Three is the crucial encounter which breaks the stalemate that began some thirty years before during the period of trial and loss of faith surrounding the death of their second child, Teddy. The unresolved events of that period concerned the four members of the extant family and complicated and compromised their relationships and affected their subsequent lives right up to the first evening of the play's action.

For Agnes it was an unreal time. When her small boy died, her husband gradually estranged himself from her "as if that had been the string". He deeply shook her self-confidence with an infidelity about which she learned something—but nothing specific. The sharp feeling of jealousy and resentment against her sister Claire finds one root of its intensity here, for not only is Agnes convinced that Claire knows about the episode in question—she suspects that her own sister betrayed her. In the prime of womanhood Agnes bent her will to the wishes of her husband. Without discussion or explanation, according to her sense of what it meant to be a wife, she accepted it when, after a year of "spilling (himself) on (her) belly", Tobias slept apart from her in another room. She remained "an honest woman" and found her refuge and defense against the emotional emptiness of her life by playing martinet—ordering, planning, organizing—assuring for Tobias a life that was the way he wanted it. Like a stubborn priestess Agnes presided over her family, preserving as best she could a delicate balance. A "stickler on points of manners, timing, tact—the graces", she has devoted her vital energy to externals—to form.

At one point Agnes says to Julia, "Men's problems are so easy; money and death". Tobias, a successful business man during the years when he spent all his time in the city, took refuge in being non-committal on the home front. He went to the country club a lot and played golf. However, what the death of his son meant to him is clearly expressed in his reaction to it. The emotional pain was so intolerable that he could not face the possibility of another child, another loss. Unable to cope with the ultimate implication of this double vulnerability, he terminated intimacy with his wife. Tobias is shy at home, not normally given to outbursts of temper or impulsive behavior, much less to easy talk about deeply personal matters. When Claire tries to tease him into recalling his single extramarital escapade "that dry and oh so wet July" after Teddy's death, he angrily mutters, "Common practice is hardly … " Ironically, during his retirement the one real emotional outlet—with the exception perhaps of gardening—for he no longer honestly enjoys golf, as Claire reminds him—the one area in which he lets his spirit soar and expand (as Claire also points out) is the safe, solitary pleasure of listening to the Romantic music of Bruckner.

When Agnes starts talking about "le temps perdu " on the morning after Tobias has slept in the same room with her for the first time in so many years because the inn is full, Albee is not talking about sexual revulsion in suburbia, as Michael E. Rutenberg would have it¹³ , but about the pitiful inability of people to respond adequately to all the demands of their lives and to the needs of those closest to them—especially in times of personal sorrow and self-absorption. "Perdu means lost, not merely … past … what a shame, what sadness", says Agnes:

It was nice to have you there, though I remember, when it was a constancy, how easily I would fall asleep, pace my breathing to your breathing, and if we were touching! ah, what a splended cocoon that was.

There is no evidence that Agnes found sex disgusting. Rather than gossip about what a general practitioner he knows told him about the sex lives of the couples in his suburban practice, Mr. Rutenberg would have done better to inquire about the psychological implications of coitus interruptus for the woman. That is what Agnes is talking about when she says, "Such … silent … sad, disgusted … love". She also makes Tobias remember how she cried out to him, "Don't leave me then, like that. Not again, Tobias, please? I can take care of it; we won't have another child, but please don't … leave me like that". On Sunday morning in no uncertain terms Agnes points out to Tobias that he is racked with guilt, stupidly, and that she must suffer for it.

That John Gassner finds "the airing of the wife's grievances … tasteless"¹⁴ is utterly irrelevant to the play. Sexuality in marriage, if it is not necessarily central, certainly is vital in the working out of the overall equilibrium in a relationship between partners. A source of pleasure and release that can be shared, it is also a means through which the loneliness of two separate people may be assuaged. That Tobias in his early thirties withdrew from his wife's bed and retired to another room and that Agnes put up with it is perhaps the most significant information there is about the two characters in the play. It is hardly fair to fault the author with the "deplorable habits of our 'advanced' playwrights" and to accuse him of a "fruitless resort to scatology", as Mr. Gassner does. Albee is depicting life. If in real life the springs of motivation usually remain obscure, the dramatist locates the moment between two people where the descent began. As Tobias puts it, "Once you drop … you can come back up part of the way … but never … really back again". In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Martha describes the boxing match, the way she impulsively and insensitively punched George in the chin, knocked him down and humiliated him in front of her father. "I hadn't meant it … honestly", she explains and then adds ruefully, "I think it's colored our whole life".

Agnes respected Tobias' wish to sleep apart not because she liked it but because she respected his wishes. And because of her own feelings of inadequacy at the time, her own agonizing uncertainty: "Ah, the things I doubted then: that I was loved—that I loved—I thought Tobias was unfaithful to me … " Because this breach between husband and wife was not dealt with candidly at the time it assumed the proportions of a skeleton in the closet. Not only did Agnes and Tobias' failure to confront their passions and feelings disrupt the development of their relationship. It had grave consequences on the emotional growth of their daughter, Julia, as well.

It is impossible to discuss the effect of the death of Teddy on Julia without examining Julia's relationship with her father. What is plain is that, emotionally inadequate, he failed to give his daughter the reassurance that she was still loved after the second child was born. Agnes recalls how "She felt unwanted, tricked". Perhaps the boy meant too much to him. There is an echo here of Peter's words in The Zoo Story: "Naturally, every man wants a son." Tobias let Agnes down because of Teddy's death; clearly, he let Julia down at his birth. After her younger brother died the girl regularly appeared at the door with scraped knees, causing her mother to wonder whether she was just clumsy or if she was doing penance for feeling more relief than loss. In vain Julia tried to reassert herself in the central position of only child. The pattern of her failed marriages is a continuation of the succession of failures at different schools during her adolescence, an unbroken series of escapes from a kind of guilt which at the same time was a search for love. Agnes wonders whether Julia failed through hate or love, and we hear again the question that Jerry asks at the end of The Zoo Story: "Was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps was the dog's attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?"

The kind of men Julia married could not make up for what she missed from her father at home. Ironically, she strongly implies that all the choices weren't her own but that her well-meaning mother had a hand in them too. Agnes reflects on the various losses that come to a woman, as when her child becomes "an adult stranger instead of a growing one". She also says, "I am almost too old to be a grandmother as I'd hoped … too young to be one. Oh, I had wanted that: the youngest older woman in the block". On Sunday morning Agnes says to Tobias, "You have a problem with Julia". This is the other confrontation that should have taken place years before. Tobias never came to grips with being a father. Oversensitive to her husband's emotional problems, Agnes deferred to his wishes and to her misguided sense of love. Instead of listening to common sense and attempting to come to terms with the crucial issue—but perhaps also influenced by her eagerness to have a grandchild—she tried to stand by Julia herself in the girl's search for love by pushing her into one marriage after another. If the parents do not make an attempt to clear up their own difficulties first, there is little use helping a problem child. Julia is the product and the victim of the unresolved emotional conflict between her parents, and particularly of her father's problems.

Tobias tells Agnes and Claire a story about a cat he had put to sleep because it stopped responding to him the way he wanted it to. There is a pattern in Tobias' life. When he did not have things as he wanted them, he did not want them at all. As Agnes sarcastically puts it, "The theory being pat: that half a loaf is worse than none". When Julia went through her "angular adolescence" and he fell, as fathers are apt to do at this stage, from a marvel to a gray non-eminence in her eyes, Tobias stopped reaching out. He did not try to have contact with her anymore. Always, rather than risk loss or pain, Tobias retreated: "If I thought I might … break through to her and say, 'Julia … ' but then what would I say? 'Julia … ' Then nothing." His story about his cat is a gloss on his relationship with his daughter:

I hated her, well, I suppose because I was being accused of something, of … failing. But I had not been cruel, by design: If I'd been neglectful, well, my life was … I resented it. I resented having a … being judged. Being betrayed.

When she makes Tobias acknowledge his selfishness to her, Agnes also points out how every time Julia came back from a marriage he failed to assert himself as a father. He did not show any interest or active concern in the girl's problems but chose rather to remain uninvolved. In the crisis precipitated by Harry and Edna's invasion, Julia's desperate cry for recognition and acceptance helps to open an avenue of contact between father and daughter. As Agnes observes, "I do believe that's the first time she's called on her father in … since her childhood".

There is far more to Claire than the "stereotype wise drunk" C.W.E. Bigsby sees in her.¹⁵ In that period of sadness and loss which had such an effect on the relationship between Agnes and Tobias, and on Julia, Claire was living out her—as Agnes phrases it—"emancipated womanhood" among the men in the neighborhood. When Claire asks Tobias what he has in common with his best friend Harry apart from the fact that they both "cheated" on their wives in the same summer with the same woman, she kindly and goodhumoredly attempts to appease his lingering guilt. "And hardly a distinction", she says. "I believe she was upended that whole July——The distinction would have been to have not." She goes on and gratuitously offers a bit of gossip; Harry had the wanton two and a half times. A critical period in Claire's personal loss of faith certainly occurred during or shortly after the summer of promiscuity which she obliquely and glibly talks about to Tobias. With "all the promise … all the chance … wasted", the several men she found briefly, "none (her) own", Claire has degenerated into a parasite with a drinking problem. There is no evidence that she ever made a serious attempt to control her own destiny. However spicy, amusing and clear-seeing she may be, she is in fact a pitiful woman without much capacity for real life. When she asks Tobias to buy them an island and take them away "to where it is always good and happy", she is only half joking. To spite her older sister Claire did not let herself be "dumped out of the nest". In effect she remained an adolescent.

The love-hate relationship between the two sisters is central to an explanation of Claire's response to life. After the disastrous Friday evening meal she jokes with Tobias: "Unless you kill Agnes … how shall I ever know whether I want to live?" She is not being funny. Claire is a bitterly unhappy woman; the unsavory descriptions of her drunkenness speak for themselves. Vitally connected to her excuse for not living is Agnes. However, the open hostility between the two sisters started much earlier, before the alcoholism, before the death-bed promise to their father at the time when they were both still at home—before family feeling was violated by an oppressive sense of duty. Claire tells Julia, "Maw used to say, Claire girl——when you go out into the world, get dumped out of the nest, or pushed by your sister … " At this point Agnes' jealousy flashes full fire: "She kept you, allowed you … tolerated! Put up with your filth … Even in her teens, your Auntie Claire had her own very special ways, was very advanced." Ironically, we hear the echo of the pattern of jealousy between the older and the younger child in Agnes' reflection at the beginning of Act Two:

The individuality we hold so dearly sinks into crotchet; we see ourselves repeated by those we bring into it all, either by mirror or reflection, honor or fault.

Between Claire's willful alcoholism and its disgusting and embarrassing consequences and her own very human doubts and feelings of sexual rivalry, it is no wonder that Agnes wishes that she and Tobias could be alone together. Her husband rises to Claire's defence every time there is an out-spoken conflict between the two sisters, reopening the wound of uncertainty, the crack in the formidable structure Agnes balances around herself:

We must always envy someone we should not, be jealous of those who have so much less. You and Claire make so much sense together, talk so well.

The family's connection with Harry and Edna is a long one. On Saturday night Claire mischievously reminds Harry of an incident in the greenhouse among the orange pots and the mulch during the critical "July". Agnes asks him point blank if Tobias was unfaithful to her that summer after Teddy died. Why have this couple come seeking refuge in the household of Agnes and Tobias? At home that Friday evening, too tired to go out to the club—he had been having his shortness of breath again—Harry decided to stay in and study his French and Edna was sitting in the room with him doing her needlepoint. She describes what happened: "It was all very quiet, and we were all alone … and the … nothing happened, but we got frightened … there was nothing … but we were very scared." Anne Paolucci considers the introduction of the Terror in this play "a rotten gimmick".¹⁶ However, what it represents is crucial to an understanding of the author's overall intention. The terror which Harry and Edna drag with them into their friends' house is not something vague like "all the diversified horrors of life"¹⁷ or, as C.A. Sykes would have it, something simple like "honesty".¹⁸ Edna says precisely what it is on Sunday morning before she and Harry go home again. "It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without … that the one body you've wrapped your arms around … the only skin you've ever known … is your own." The terror or "plague" as Agnes describes it is the failure of love and the fear of isolation. Behind the external form and finish of their lives, these two people are face to face with the emptiness of the world they have created around themselves in the course of their lives together. They know that Harry's heart attack is imminent and that death and separation are close. With only what they remember between them and nothing to look forward to—nothing left to hope for anymore—in an act of panic they try to break out. Under the motto of "best friends", in their death agony they clutch at their relationship with Agnes and Tobias.

From the moment Harry and Edna enter the house on Friday night new perspectives open for them. They start taking over. Harry looks the room up and down and jealously admires the leather-bound books. He lets Tobias help him with his luggage on Saturday night. Eventually he assumes the presiding role at the family bar. Almost the first thing Edna does when she enters the house is criticize Agnes' upholstery. Now that she is going to live there she will see to having it changed! Ironically, Edna reads the riot act to Julia for not having done the image of marriage much good, and she scolds Agnes and Claire for bickering with each other. "When an environment is not all that it might be", she says smugly, "we must be helpful when we can, my dear; that is the … responsibility, the double demand of friendship … is it not?"

Whatever the initial impulse was—perhaps the fulfillment of the first few years of their life together before Teddy's death—Agnes never lost sight of it. In spite of the extent to which she devoted her life to being a terribly necessary aspect of the lives of others, she never ceased to be a person in her own right. She still demands something for herself. To begin with Agnes knows that people cannot evade their own difficulties by trying to remedy those of others and, unlike Tobias, she has no sentimental feelings about abstractions like friendship. On Sunday morning she asks him five times, "What did you decide" about the invasion of Harry and Edna. With tact, patience and quiet deliberation she prompts her husband to reconsider his responsibilities to her and to Julia and to admit that if best friends should be something more than Harry and Edna are to them it is their poverty that they are not and too late now to do anything about it: "Blood binds us together when we've no more … deep affection for ourselves than others." Walter Kerr describes Agnes near the end of the play: "The cool champagne-cocktail ice of her voice burns away and something nearer lava is served neat."¹⁹

When Harry and Edna first arrive, Claire, the only one in the family who—when she is not numbed with alcohol—consciously lives with the terror, immediately understands what they want. "Warmth. A special room with a night light, or the door ajar so you can look down the hall from the bed and see that Mommy's door is open." Earlier Friday evening while teasing Tobias, she hints at something like this: "Now and then—you are suddenly frightened and you don't know why?" Tobias prevaricates. Agnes, however, admits that she knows the dangers that lurk around the edges of the shape that she so conscientiously strives to maintain. She understands the threat of "the plague"—the bleak sterility of life without hope, the despair of nothingness. She knows that her family is not stable enough to risk infection. On Sunday morning Harry and Edna depart of their own free will, having admitted to each other in the dark that, were the situation reversed, Agnes and Tobias would not have "rights" in their house either. They learn that people should not need to test each other too far for proof of love. Humbled and newly dependent upon one another they return to their own home to see things through to the end together. Shyly, Harry confides to Tobias:

You know what I did last night? … I got out of bed and I … crawled in with Edna … she held me. She let me stay awhile, then I could see she wanted to, and I didn't … so I went back. But it was funny.

A little later, when the women are alone, Edna confides to them:

Poor Harry: he's not a … callous man, for all his bluff. (Relaxing a little, almost a contentment) He … he came to my bed last night, got in with me, I … let him stay, and talk. I let him think I … wanted to make love; he … it pleases him I think—to know he would be wanted, if he …

During the emotional upset of that weekend Harry and Edna become re-acquainted. They speak about one another to their friends with consideration and new awareness. When they go back to their own house on Sunday morning it will not be as empty as it was when they left it on Friday night. They may talk more again. Touch more. Be a little less lonely.

As for Claire at the end of the play, she did say earlier that she was shopping for a bathing suit. Perhaps she will make Agnes happy and take a vacation while Julia is at home. Claire is in her fifties; she will not change much anymore. She has looked into the void and chosen not to commit suicide. And not to commit herself to anyone or anything else either. She seeks the cruel comfort of her older sister's household and the dubious consolation of alcohol. Monokini or two piece, with her attitude toward life there is small likelihood that she will "find a man". Claire will go on as she is, seeing everything, doing nothing. As Agnes observes, "(she) is the strongest of us all: the walking wounded often are the least susceptible". Claire will remain the embodiment of the aching of conscience and of the doubts and fears that are the companions of every life. She is the living representation of the disturbances and intrusions from the outside world which threaten the delicate balance of every marrige, of every relationship. Nevertheless, although not altogether unselfishly, for it is also in her own interest that Harry and Edna depart from the premises, with the "teaching emotion"—the proper mixture of kindness and cruelty—Claire is the one who pushes Julia to the edge of panic. She helps to provoke the hysterical outburst which has such a catalytic effect on the emotional lives of both families. Claire forces Julia to realize that at the age of thirty-six she is "a visitor as much as anyone now", that there is "a great big world——hotels, new cities". Even if she herself has turned her back on life and consciously chosen to remain a proud beggar, Claire knows in her heart that in order to cease to be a child each individual must detach himself from his parents.

Because of the events of the bizarre weekend, the most room for change has opened up in the life of Julia, the youngest of all of them. She feels herself reinstated in the family. This time when she asks for reassurance, Tobias is a father to her. In the clash between them on Saturday evening, as Tobias vents "the disgust of his declining years", he makes possible the beginning of a new meeting; the silence between father and daughter is broken. Julia is thrilled: "Sea monster, ram! Nasty, violent, absolutely human man!" Love by rejection and default becomes the love of mutual acceptance. "I'm sorry for having embarrassed you", she says when she comes down on Sunday morning. "Aren't you sorry for embarrassing me, too?" By the end of the play she is good humoredly bossing over the coffee cups. It is "Pop" this and "Julie" that. Perhaps she was "getting ready to pull a Claire" when she came home for the fourth time, but she does point out to her aunt, "I have left Doug. We are not divorced". Julia may go back to her husband and she may also—now that she has been given the background—be able to form a lasting relationship with a partner and as a mature woman start a family of her own.

The insight that Tobias gains on Sunday morning is shattering: "Have we meant, yes, but only if … if there's any condition, Agnes! Then it's … all been empty." In his head—and—heart confrontation with Harry he releases with "horror and exuberance" the emotions he has kept under control for so many years. In vain with his friend he tries to make up for his failures—his selfishness with his cat, with his wife, and with his daughter. However, as Albee says, "Tobias can no longer fill his life with the problem of making an important choice. He cries, 'Dilemma, come back! ' But it is too late".²⁰ What is most important for Tobias is his recognition that, if things turned out the way they did, it was because of his own limitations. He does not blame Harry and Edna, or the others. He tries to be honest. Finally, he says to his family, "I'm sorry. I apologize".

At the very end when the four of them are alone together again among the empty glasses and the coffee cups (which a little earlier in a small but significant gesture, Tobias, who from his youth has been accustomed to have everything cleaned up for him, helps Julia to set aside), Agnes puts her arm around her husband. The question that she asked him on Friday night has answered itself: "You have hope, only, of growing older than you are in the company of your steady wife, your alcoholic sister-in-law and occasional visits … from our melancholy Julia. (A little sad) That is what you have, my dear Tobias. Will it do?" Tobias has seen that he has no further options. And he has survived the judgement of his three women without feeling betrayed. He knows that Agnes does not want him to leave her room again. It is too late to make up for the years they have wasted. Perhaps from now on, though, Tobias will trust himself to reach across to find his wife's hand in "the dark sadness".

Notes

¹All quotations from this play are taken from Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1967).

²The description of the set is taken from the following discussions of the original New York production of A Delicate Balance: Robert Brustein, "Albee Decorates an Old House," in Edward Albee: Twentieth Century Views ed. Maynard Mack, (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 136, and Walter Kerr, New York Times, 23 Sept. 1966.

³Kerr, loc. cit.

⁴See Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), p. 108.

⁵See C.W.E. Bigsby, Albee (Edinburgh: Oliver and Bogd, 1969), p. 99 and Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (New York: DBS Publications, Inc., 1969), pp. 133-4.

⁶"'Strangers in a Room: A Delicate Balance Revisited," Modern Drama, 17, No. 2 (June 1974), 201.

⁷Rutenberg, p. 130.

⁸Ibid., "Interview with Edward Albee, August 7,1968," pp. 230-1.

⁹Paolucci, p. 107.

¹⁰"Broadway in Review," Educational Theater Journal, 18, No. 4 (Dec. 1966), 451.

¹¹Edward Albee, p. 79.

¹²Albee, pp. 96-100.

¹³Playwright in Protest, p. 149.

¹⁴Gassner, "Broadway in Review," p. 450.

¹⁵Albee, p. 107.

¹⁶From Tension to Tonic, p. 106.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 110.

¹⁸"Albee's Beast Fables: The Zoo Story and A Delicate Balance," Educational Theater Journal, 25, No. 4 (Dec. 1973), 435.

¹⁹Kerr, New York Times, loc. cit.

²⁰Life, 28 Oct. 1966, p. 120.