About the Play:

A Delicate Balance has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, and Female/Male Scenes.

A Delicate Balance is a full-length drama by Edward Albee. What would you do? Long-time friends arrive at your door unannounced and terrified – unable to say what they are running from, or how long they plan to stay. An unexplained fear has gripped them, and they have turned to you as their first and last resort. Edward Albee won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes for this absorbing look into the everyday hopes, fears, and secrets we all so delicately balance.

A Delicate Balance reveals the emotional savagery of suburbia and the psychological terror of empty lives. Friday night in the suburbs. Agnes and Tobias are a well-off, long-married couple who share their home with Agnes's older sister, Claire, a self-proclaimed "drunk." Their complacency is shattered when Harry and Edna, longtime friends arrive unexpectedly at their doorstep. Claiming an encroaching, nameless "fear" has forced them from their own home, these neighbours bring a firestorm of doubt, recrimination and ultimately solace, upsetting the "delicate balance" of Agnes and Tobias' household. The next day, their grown daughter Julia shows up, expecting to move home again after the collapse of her fourth marriage. Agnes and Tobias soon realize they must make some difficult choices about what to do next. Filled with shades of meaning, subtleties, and whole paragraphs of brilliant dialogue, A Delicate Balance may be Edward Albee's masterpiece, a timeless mirror of the worst, and sometimes the best, aspects of modern life.

A Delicate Balance premiered in 1966 at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway in New York City. This dark drawing room comedy won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and spawned two Broadway revivals. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Powerful… A beautiful play filled with humor and compassion, and touched with poetry...[with] the stature and eloquence of a classic." — New York Daily News

"A brilliant play." — New York Post

"An evening of theatrical fireworks." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Edward Albee (1928-2016) was an American playwright. Widely considered the foremost American dramatist of his generation, he wrote and directed some of the best plays in contemporary American theatre. Three of his plays have received Pulitzer Prizes, and two won a Tony Award for best play. He was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1996 he received both the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts. In 2005 he was awarded the special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.