Having more or less disposed of the university and the church in his last two plays, Edward Albee has now chosen to weave his intricate web around a more personal institution, American family life. A Delicate Balance commences at cocktail hour in the affluent suburban home of a sixtyish couple named Agnes and Tobias. All is cozy and comfortable, and even the presence of Agnes's alcoholic younger sister, Claire, fails seriously to disrupt their façcade of contentment. It is not smugness, but a contentment achieved through concern for what each thinks the other one wants. In doing this they have ceased to want anything themselves. They are not fools, however, and see the truth of their situation at the same time that they participate in its myth.

Two principal myths are examined in this play. The first is that people who are sufficiently happy together or enough in love to get married will forever remain happy and in love. Albee punctures this one early with the parable of Tobias and the cat. Here we see that a man who is unable to regain a love that has dissipated equates his inability with being judged—being betrayed—and reacts with hatred and viciousness. But married people often avoid such an outcome by pretending, by living up to a myth that they may privately recognize as untrue. Thus we resign ourselves and, as one character says, through "the gradual demise of intensity, the private preoccupations, the substitutions, we become allegorical.… The individuality we held so dearly sinks into crotchet; we see ourselves repeated by those we bring into it all, either by mirror or rejection.…"

The second myth is that best friends acquired through proximity and mutual activities can always depend upon each other's help no matter how great the sacrifice entailed. Albee suggests that if the latter myth can be shown to be absurd, so must the former also be.

To test the balance of "the regulated great gray life," Albee simply has Agnes's and Tobias's best friends, Harry and Edna, arrive unexpectedly at the door. They have experienced "the terror" (which, though never explained, is presumably that point at which awareness of the distance between myth and truth becomes unbearable), and demand to move in. Agnes recognizes that their terror could be contagious and calls upon Tobias to choose between letting them stay permanently or ordering them out. This eventually results in a remarkable mad eruption by Tobias in which his contradictory feelings are revealed. His position is at once hilariously ridiculous and touchingly pathetic. And though the play nominally ends on an anti-climatic note, we leave the theater feeling that we have seen a most important part of our way of life compassionately but accurately described.

We also feel, of course, that it has been challenged, though not as excoriatingly as we had anticipated. A remark by Claire that is almost a footnote is the play's strongest indictment. "We're not a communal nation, giving but not sharing, outgoing but not friendly. We submerge our truths and have our sunsets on untroubled waters. We live with our truths in the grassy bottom, and we examine all the interpretations of all the implications like we had a life for nothing else … We better develop gills."

The play is not easy to perform. In a way, Albee has tried to do in prose what T. S. Eliot did in verse in his later plays, and without the help of meter Albee's succession of paragraphed insights can seem talky. This is particularly true because of the lack of specific information that emerges from all the conversation. Fortunately, Albee sprinkles his script with his special humor—and theatricality—to keep us entertained when the plot does not.

Jessica Tandy plays the role of Agnes, "licensed wife," with so much composure that we tend to see her as an instrument of propriety. Hume Cronyn is excellent and versatile as To-bias, but he is so completely explicit that we sometimes miss the inner mystery and private grief, that might make him more protagonist and less demonstrator. Oddly enough, Henderson Forsythe and Carmen Mathews in the much smaller roles of Harry and Edna emerge with more human dimension. And most effective of all are Rosemary Murphy and Marian Seldes. As the alcoholic, outspoken Claire, Miss Murphy has the opportunity to speak nasty truths about everyone else and makes the mischievous most of it. Miss Seldes, as Julia, the daughter who keeps returning to the nursery dragging in broken marriages "like some Raggedy Ann doll by the foot," gives the fullest emotional performance of all. It is her rage and her frustration that most indict her elders' complaisance.

While Alan Schneider's direction is thorough, both it and William Ritman's large, handsome set make the people in this play seem remote. Perhaps this was the playwright's intention: for us to see ourselves from a distance in a space where elegant language seems natural and four-letter Anglo-Saxon words become seven-letter Latin ones.

If what we see is convincing and sophisticated, it is not steadily compelling. The audience keeps wanting to get closer to the characters. There is, for instance, the suggestion that Claire had been "upended" by Tobias one summer long ago, and that had he divorced Agnes to marry her things might have been better for everyone. Yet it is never explored. Obviously the playwright is concerned with the process of restoring delicate balances rather than what it takes to upset them.

However, steadily compelling plays are few these days, and, all things considered, A Delicate Balance will do. It will do because it manages to encompass a complex subject with such honesty and grace.