Undoubtedly Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance was intended to be the big opening of the 1966-67 season, and it was just that if controversy is any measure of importance. But is it? The controversy was inconsequential, since no particular issue was involved. Some reviewers considered it an extremely poor play while others went so far as to regard it as Albee's best work. Reviewers as far apart on basic matters as Walter Kerr, now ensconced in the seat of judgment at The New York Times, and Robert Brustein of the New Republic brought in a distinctly negative verdict, while the enthusiasts included such strange bedfellows as Richard Watts of the New York Post and Harold Clurman, who writes on plays in The Nation when not staging them on two continents. The public verdict unmistakably supported the "Ayes," and it was instantly evident that the investors in the show had made a good investment.

My own conclusion, if it matters to anyone, is that A Delicate Balance is neither a very good play nor a very bad one, an improvement certainly on the Albee plays that followed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that missed the mark in important respects and was not particularly distinguished when it seemed to hit it. In A Delicate Balance, Mr. Albee has returned to the world of domesticity which gave him his strongest full-length drama, and it is understandable that reviewers should have registered some relief at encountering a sympathetic approach to humanity in the work. He has exorcized the ghost of Strindberg without calling up the ghost of Pollyanna to take its place. In fact, some of the bad writing in the play retains memories of Virginia Woolf in the airing of the wife's grievances against her husband, and contains a startlingly tasteless reference to coitus interruptus. (One of the most deplorable habits our "advanced" playwrights have picked up from the surface Naturalism of modern drama is the fruitless resort to scatology in season or out.) The main trouble with Albee's "playmaking" in this work is in fact closely related to the interest and the potential strength of the play, which makes me wish he had worked longer on the play and that his director, Mr. Alan Schneider, had been more resistant to the author's theatrical guile and dramatic energy.

There is something, perhaps even a great deal, to be said for the domestic situation that the playwright uses to demonstrate how delicate is the balance that keeps a happiness in the home or a domestic relationship possible, and how easily it is upset by a variety of factors. In the present play, these include an element of accident in the antecedent death of a boy-child that ruined the sexual harmony of the husband and wife many years ago, its effect on the marital life of a much divorced daughter of the household as well as on the hysteria of the bleakly crisp middle-aged wife Agnes, impersonated by Jessica Tandy, and the arid passiveness of the husband Tobias, well, if depressingly, played by Hume Cronyn. It is unfortunate, however, that this theme remains muddily omnipresent in the play except in moments when the wife hurls reproaches at Tobias that seem both unwarranted by the objective realities of the play and dramatically irrelevant no matter how relevant they might be in a comparatively well executed novel based on this subject.

A second disruption factor is the presence of the wife's hard-drinking and defiant sister Claire. Rosemary Murphy plays her with a vivacity notably absent in the performances of Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, and Claire's dialogue, a tissue of verbal provocations and cynical remarks in general, contains the best writing in the play. But it is virtually impossible to account for her presence in the drama as a disturbing force. Her presence seems arbitrary and is unconvincingly accounted for. Either she shouldn't be in the play or there should be a good reason for her being there. The wife's thin thread of insinuation that the husband had been unfaithful with Claire simply has no roots in either the present action or the present feelings of the characters that would reflect a past relationship.

A third disturbing factor is the much-married daughter who has just left her last husband. There is much talk on her part about the long-deceased sibling, which could account for something significant only in a painstakingly constructed novel. There is also perfervid talk by mother Agnes that To-bias has failed in his fatherly duty to send her back to her husbands containing an insinuation to the effect that he has always been glad to get her back after her various marriages. But this theme, too, seems arbitrary; it hangs like a Freudian spider's-web from the ceiling of the author's aspirations. The only things we can observe relevantly are that the young woman (in her thirties, I believe) simply loathes her mother and is hysterically averse to having two married house-guests occupy her bedroom when she shows up unexpectedly after her latest marital fiasco. Marian Seldes puts life, or at least drama, into the play with her playing of this daughter, Julia, so intolerable a creature that the audience was vastly relieved when the fine actress Carmen Mathews, playing the female house-guest, calmly slapped her face at one especially irritating point.

Next, I must consider the central situation of the intrusion of the neighboring couple, Harry and Edna, long-time friends of the suburban or, if you will, exurban Agnes and Tobias, who were suddenly overcome by indefinable fear while sitting quietly at home. They request succor from Agnes and Tobias and are politely allowed to occupy daughter Julia's bedroom until the latter raises such a row when she returns from her latest marital failure that it becomes necessary to tell the guests to leave. This duty devolves upon Tobias, or rather it is forced upon him by his wife. Haltingly he carries this out, being aided by Harry (effectively played by Henderson Forsythe) himself, who admits that he would have turned out Tobias from his home if the situation had been reversed. This scene, which is also the resolution of the play, accounts for some fifteen minutes of almost gripping and moderately penetrating drama that sums up much of the anguish of human aloneness. It is an anguish intensified in the case of Tobias, by the desire to respect friendship to the uttermost and the realization that he is at bottom neither capable of it nor really free to give it, even if he had it to give. If we do not want to betray a friendship, we do not really want to carry it very far. If we do, the others to whom we are commited by marital and parental relationships will force us to set narrow bourgeois limits to it. We will then have betrayed the one ideal we evidently cherished and thought we could afford, and the painful irony of it is that we were mistaken on both counts. We did not actually cherish it, of course, but merely took it for granted, in the spirit of easy neighborliness and country-club cordiality which costs us little and certainly causes no serious complications; that is, the relationship remains intact only as long as it costs us little and disturbs us less. Well prepared early in the play, actually twice prepared, this resolution of the play is reinforced rather than weakened by the fact that the friends' fears are never defined. Late in the play we sense, if we don't exactly know, that they were overcome by the pointlessness of their vaguely comfortable and socially acceptable lives and with the lovelessness of their middle-aged and middle-class marital status. It suddenly "hit" them both simultaneously, as it should have also overwhelmed Agnes and Toby, and would probably have done so if they had been left as alone as Harry and Edna were.

Nevertheless, even this central situation is ultimately frustrating, even on not very close inspection. It is "central" but insecurely so; that is, it has to share both the foreground and the background of the play with other, at best tenuously related, dramatic elements contributed by the daughter, the sister-in-law, and the central couple itself. And by the same token, the resolution of the play in the final confrontation between Tobias and Harry, good as it is as a dramatic scene per se, is not a resolution for a play that has so many diverse and incompletely realized elements. On the most obvious level, it resolves nothing about the daughter and the sisterin-law; and it is altogether vacuous as a resolution of the fuzzy failure of Agnes and Tobias as either separate individuals or as a married couple. And this leaves only one "delicate balance" to be accounted for, but on this subject the play does not contribute anything that is not obvious and banal.

I have proceeded in this methodical and humdrum fashion in order to explain as much as I can my uneasy reaction to A Delicate Balance. And I have played the schoolmaster, the egregiously commonplace schoolmaster, rather than the critic, because I believe that Edward Albee, his loyal associates, and his enthusiastic supporters need patient instruction much more than they need or deserve castigation in this instance. You may call my homiletics a lesson in "how not to write a play" when you are as talented as Edward Albee and could, with patience, write a much better one with virtually the same material and the same point of view.

If I refrain from discussing the staging it is because its defects are integral to the play. The direction is faithful, almost painfully so, to the script, and to the author's faults and defaults. I was not alone in the "second night" audience in finding Jessica Tandy much too high-pitched and irritatingly glittery, which is evidently the dramatic intention, and hard to understand in passages of great volubility. Still, the excess is in the author's lines through which he endeavored to convey a variety of tensions and uneasy pretentions on the part of the character. Presenting these would be tantamount indeed to good characterization if the character of Agnes had any perceptible core rather than a posture, and if it did not try our patience more than it illuminated or, for that matter, defined the individual behind the brittle mask. Moreover, it is a mistake for a principal actress to try to define her role in a long play by irritating the audience, as in Miss Tandy's case, even with a display of energy and virtuosity. Just as it is a mistake for the author to overexpose his own virtuosity in speeches that may be abstrusely bright but have little human context! And, let me add, just as it has been a mistake for the designer of the setting, Mr. William Ritman, to turn out a stage set that is designed to suggest the emptiness of the occupants' lives without considering that an illusionistic setting should not fail to localize the action vividly and suggest a lived-in world for characters who are intended to be more than walking and talking symbols. A negative setting, no matter how metaphorically conceived, is visually vacuum, and it is difficult to find a vacuum interesting. Semi-abstractness in the designing and lighting of the environment, either abetted or condoned by the director, was quite unhelpful to the play, which was rather coreless and abstract to begin with so far as the characters are concerned.