A Delicate Balance

A Delicate Balance is the newest work in the Arion Press drama series, honoring one of America’s great contemporary playwrights, Edward Albee. The edition features four illustrations by Tom Holland, an acclaimed artist and friend of the playwright.

A mature couple, Agnes and Tobias, he recently retired, lead upper-middle-class lives of quiet desperation. They reside in a Northeastern suburb where servants still cook dinner, the country club plays a major role, and living room bars are always well stocked. They have to deal with what appear to be four permanent, unwanted house guests.

David Littlejohn, in his perceptive introduction, asks: “By what verbal and imaginative magic does Albee manage to transform stories as mean and vicious as these, relationships so full of contentiousness and spite, into profound and moving theatrical experiences?

“In his stage directions, Albee specifically calls Tobias’s long, near-hysterical, self-contradictory third-act outburst in front of Harry, his ‘best friend’ and life invader, an ‘aria’. Throughout it, he provides dynamic and tonal advice, in the manner of a composer or conductor—phrases all in capital letters, semicolons and dashes, ellipsis dots, exclamation points and question marks (often together)—and stage directions that are the equivalent of a composer’s marginal notations.”

Littlejohn concludes: “Albee is the most astute musician on the modern American non-musical stage, as well as its most brilliant rhetorician.”

Edward Albee was born in 1928. His adoptive father was the son of a vaudeville magnate and owned several theaters. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for drama: for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). Other well-known plays are The Sandbox (1959), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002). He received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2002, and the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts, both in 1996. Albee lived in New York City.

Arion’s drama series also includes American Buffalo by David Mamet, published in 1992; A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard, 1993; The Price by Arthur Miller, 1999; Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, 2001; Tartuffe by Molière, translated by Richard Wilbur, 2004; and Godot by Samuel Beckett, 2006; the seventh in the series is A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee.

There are three illustrations in the book and one on the front cover. These are reproductions of watercolors, printed digitally and tipped into and onto the book.

As Littlejohn writes in his introduction: “Drinking, as Tom Holland’s illustrations suggest, plays a large part in this play—almost as large a part as in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I count about twenty-three glasses of hard liquor onstage in A Delicate Balance (plus Agnes’s reference to good wine at dinner).”

Tom Holland has made abstract images of bottles and glasses that appear at the beginnings of the three acts and an abstraction of a house for the cover. These cunning watercolors look like stained glass windows with sunlight shining through.

Tom Holland is an artist who lives and works in Berkeley, California. He has been on the faculties of the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley. He received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since the 1970s, Holland has painted on materials other than canvas, such as fiberglass and aluminum, works that combine painting and sculpture. Unframed wall hangings and free-standing objects are made up of cut pieces riveted together, with epoxy paint applied. He also makes works on paper and of marble and copper.

Edward Albee was a friend of Tom Holland and has work by Holland in his extensive art collection. It was Albee who suggested Holland at the artist for this book, an idea welcomed by publisher Andrew Hoyem, who has long been an admirer of Holland’s art.

David Littlejohn has been reviewing and writing about theater and the other arts in California and internationally since 1965. He has served as a West Coast cultural correspondent for The Wall Street Journal since 1990. For Arion Press, he wrote the introduction to Godot, on Samuel Beckett and William T. Wiley.