If someone should tell you that Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance is a brilliant play (which it is), ask: "What is its theme?" If another declares that it is very well written (also true), insist on knowing exactly how. And if its staging is praised, try to discover in what regard.

One might discuss the play's accomplishment in the context of its craftsmanship: a slight plot suffices to sustain a long evening and to maintain suspense. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this was achieved through the sparkling venom of the dialogue. The new play proceeds through a continuous enrichment of its theme. Its style crystallizes its meaning.

The play dramatizes discomfort. Its world is not absurd and it is not cruel; it is without comfort. Here one's soul finds no resting place, no spiritual security. The distress that plagues it is all the more acute for being encased in a glittering shell.

This private world which is Albee's, to a greater degree than most of us know or care to admit, is largely ours as well.

What produces this "plague"? We love and cannot bear one another. We need our fellow men desperately, yet cannot reconcile ourselves to their otherness. We yearn for closeness, yet a dismal distance separates us.

This is seldom apparent to us because we are not savages or hoodlums: we generally treat one another with courtesy. In A Delicate Balance we are, in contrast to The Zoo Story, among sophisticated circumstances. There is an unnatural elegance about the environment. The talk is colloquial enough to be thoroughly American and elaborate enough to approximate the speech of an 18th-century drawing-room play. This is deliberate. Albee wishes us to be at home and yet to remove us to a more abstract sphere. His people are familiar and somehow strangers. They are personae—masks. Ordinary words and phrases are transformed into a special language which we never hear spoken except on a stage. It removes us from the mundane; while it is peculiarly attractive it also disturbs and makes for a slight but persistent uneasiness. It hides its hurt and hate. It is not realism but perhaps high comedy. A jazzy decorum, usually euphonious, is the mark of an extreme tension.

The characters are well-to-do, though we never know how they earn their living. (The absence of a specific background passes unnoticed because the time of the play's action is compressed into thirty hours of a weekend.) A country club is mentioned; we are presumably in the sleek suburbia.

Middle-aged Agnes is the family's fulcrum: she keeps its balance by the force of propriety. Her husband, Tobias, is evasive, taciturn, suppressed: he is rarely allowed to finish a sentence. He is reasonable and invariably correct. Every-thing painful or messy, all emotional anarchy is firmly checked by Agnes.

Claire, Agnes' sister, is the dissonant but ineffectual voice of dissent. A resolute alcoholic, or more accurately, she asserts, a drunk, she understands everything but is incapable of decided action. She is a rebellious "outsider," herself in need of protection. She cannot even declare her desire for her brother-in-law.

Agnes and Tobias have had a son, who died. She wanted another child, but the shock of the boy's death has filled To-bias with terror at the idea of bringing new life into the world. As a result, his sex appetite is arrested. There is a daughter, Julia, who has been thrice married and divorced. On her return home we learn that she has left her husband.

Into this household where good manners barely clamp the lid on hysteria, come Harry and Edna, members of the country club. They have come to stay permanently. They have no other explanation for their intrusion except that they are frightened. Their fear is all the more scary for being without defined cause. They proclaim their right to take refuge in their best friends' home. Julia, who seeks solace in the bosom of her family—a cold bosom since there can be little warmth where so much is repressed—resents these friends who have pre-empted her room. She demands that her parents order Harry and Edna out.

The decision falls to Tobias because, as Agnes points out, by his very passivity Tobias has actually ruled the hearth. In the crucial confrontation of the play Tobias, through an anguished confession, finally takes a stand, the kind of moral decision that most of us seldom make. Though he has never really felt "one" with Harry, never really loved him and wishes he had never been troubled by Harry's sudden dependence on him, he pleads with Harry to stay. For they are friends and what does friendship mean unless it goes to the limit of giving all one has to give?

This scene might have been a trite bid for sympathy, in accordance with the Broadway stage code which demands that you must root for someone in every play. But the situation is saved from sentimentality when we hear Harry's admission that he would not have allowed Tobias to live with him if the case were reversed. Harry and Edna leave. Neither man is a good or a bad person. They are just folk. What Albee means to convey through them and the others is the almost insuperable difficulty of loving one's neighbor, and the absolute necessity of behaving with love despite that difficulty.

It would be beside the point at this juncture to compare Albee's play with those of foreign authors who treat adjacent themes. One must first of all recognize the American accent in Albee, his individuality. Nor will it profit us to resist him at present because his vision is not yet broad enough to give his subject greater scope. The play has social relevance, though in this vein insufficient social extension or precise dramatization. Like so many of his generation Albee is as yet too self-absorbed for the broader exertion. His present success lies in the very deft objectivation of his inner state. Our reservations should not mar our appreciation. The play is a further step in the author's progress: it is superior to the more sensational Virginia Woolf.

The production is technically proficient. In most cases I am content to indicate as much and let it go at that because I am thoroughly aware how ungrateful an undertaking it is in our disorganized theatre to do full justice to a subtle play.

Able and sympathetic actors have been cast in all the parts, but several of them have been miscast. As performance, Hume Cronyn's is the best. He understands Tobias, he is relaxed and true; he has feeling. But since the play deals in types—notice that none of the characters is given a family name—something more is involved than the actor's personal merit.

Alan Schneider, the director, has realized that the play requires a certain reserve or coolness of statement. For this reason he has avoided insisting on seething emotion. Still, his method does not convey the play's quality. Tobias should not be rendered as a "little man" (I am not speaking of height) but as an outwardly imposing figure, a very "senator" of a man, a pillar of our business community in whom the springs of sensibility have begun to dry through disuse. The welling up of his being in the play's crisis would then become more stirring and, what is more important, exemplary. The "little man" of the play is Harry who as cast looks more like a Tobias.

Edna too should have a humbler look instead of the bearing of command Carmen Matthews assumes by her very presence. Thus when Edna claims her and her husband's right as friends she should not appear self-righteous but pathetically lost. Jessica Tandy, as handsome as a Gainsborough portrait, hews close to the director's "line" for Agnes, but this can only become dramatically moving through her almost heroic effort to control the surrounding as well as the inner havoc—the very thing which makes her suspect, in hope more than in dread, that she might some day go mad. This note is absent from Miss Tandy's playing. Her daughter Julia should give the impression of having been the pride of her "Vassar" class, a woman efficiently bright and smartly sexy whose clamorous outbreak should strike us as some-thing entirely unpredictable. Marian Seldes looks as though she had always been as sensitive as a violin string. Rosemary Murphy is effective as the bibulous sister, but through the directorial unbalance she has been edged toward a complacent comedic comment. There is not sufficient torment beneath her sallies.

William Ritman's setting is just what the author has asked for but does not create the style or mood the play demands: a wan space in which amid the status-stamped appointments loneliness creeps under the door and pervades the proceedings like a fog. Such a setting need not appear obviously anti-realistic. Robert Edmond Jones, for example, knew how—through the disposition of properties, lights and colors—to make a setting speak a dramatic message without obstructing the audience's recognition of practical topography.

These critical remarks should not mitigate my readers' obligation to see the play at the Martin Beck. A Delicate Balance deserves our close attention. There will be very few new American plays this season to warrant the same.