Revivals of some Pulitzer Prize-winning plays leave us scratching our heads, wondering what the awards committee saw in the work. At Palm Beach Dramaworks, however, a new production of Edward Albee’s 1966 A Delicate Balance ― the first of his three Pulitzers for drama ― is a convincing argument for this chilling, cerebral tale of unspecified terror, even if it will always be under the shadow of his more explosive Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
We first see affluent, WASP-y Agnes and Tobias in their tastefully appointed living room one evening, expecting that their biggest challenge will be selecting an after-dinner drink. But then their much-married and almost as frequently divorced daughter Julia calls to announce her intention to return home after another separation.
Less expected is the arrival of Agnes and Tobias’s neighbors and best friends, Edna and Harry, who relate how an overwhelming, inexplicable fear came over them while at home. So they intend to avail themselves of their friendship and move in with the dismayed Agnes and Tobias, whose house is soon full.
Their tidy world quickly crumbles, as Albee asks us to consider what we would do in the situation, to mull our obligation to family and friends. Agnes and Tobias are left to ruminate on the matter, in Albee’s signature, hyper-articulate, aphorism-rich language.
William Hayes does not leave much of a directorial footprint on the play, but he casts it well and moves his actors about Michael Amico’s tastefully monochromatic set with a simple elegance.
His coup is gaining the services of Maureen Anderman, an Albee veteran of several Broadway productions, as cool, controlled Agnes. As she imperiously snaps her dialogue, it is clear what a force to be reckoned with the character is.
Every bit her equal is Dramaworks mainstay Dennis Creaghan (Tobias), tackling the quandary of his invaded domain. He is particularly effective with an early monologue about a failed relationship with a pet cat ― shades of Zoo Story ― and his eventual confrontation with Harry, both harnessing Albee’s serpentine sentence structure with a conversational air.
The play belongs to Agnes and Tobias, but Albee’s most vivid creation is Agnes’s alcoholic sister Claire, an “in vino veritas” truth-teller. Angie Radosh handles her dialogue with martini-dry wit, imparting caustic wisdom as befits the character’s name. Dealt an almost unplayable hand as Julia, newcomer Anne Bates is fairly persuasive with her childish temper tantrums.
Like the majority of Albee’s body of work, A Delicate Balance has had its pendulum swings of being in and out of favor with audiences and critics. Why that is would make a worthy subject of study, but the Dramaworks production leave little doubt that this is a major play of enduring stage worthiness.
A DELICATE BALANCE, Palm Beach Dramaworks at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Jan. 6. Tickets: $55. Call: (561) 514-4042.
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Director Lou Tyrrell is carrying on the traditions of discovering and producing new plays that brought him to prominence over a 24-year span at Florida Stage. That is a precarious process, one that yields work of high quality and others that fail to measure up.
Lauren Gunderson’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear, the opening show of his second season at The Theatre at Arts Garage, falls into the latter category.
Dubbed a “revenge comedy,” it considers the matter of spousal abuse, but in such broadly comic, one-sided strokes that there seems little at stake in the outcome.
The tale is so weighted in her favor, it would be hard to find an audience member who did not side with pummeled Nan, the wife of a Georgia redneck named Kyle. He is a caricature of a beer-swilling, abusive male chauvinist, so much of a Neanderthal that the only question is how violent a revenge does he deserve. Eaten by a bear, perhaps?
From the play’s beginning, Nan has decided to leave the crud. Before she does, she duct tapes him to his Laz-y-Boy recliner, baiting it with packages of venison meat and squirts of honey to attract the bears that lurk outside his mountain cabin.
The play’s title is Shakespeare’s infamous stage direction from The Winter’s Tale. Gunderson knows the Bard’s canon, sprinkling Elizabethan references her and there, but most of the script’s strained humor is strictly of the Southern good-’ol-boy variety.
As Nan, Niki Fridh is intent on rubbing Kyle’s (David Nail) nose in what he has done to her. So she enlists the aid of two friends ― a buxom stripper and would-be actress named Sweetheart (Lindsey Forgey) and an effeminate gay pal, Simon (David Hemphill) ― to recreate scenes from their marriage.
The cast is capable enough, but they have nowhere to take the material, just as playwright Gunderson doesn’t. Exit, Pursued by a Bear is not a very long play, but it sure feels like it is.
EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR, The Theatre at Arts Garage, 180 N.E. First St., Delray Beach. Through Sunday, Dec. 30. Tickets: $30-$40. Call: (561) 450-6357.
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In 1964, playwright Murray Schisgal made his Broadway debut with a giddy, jaundiced take on love and marriage, called simply LUV. A mix of romantic comedy and theater of the absurd, it effectively lampooned the difficulties of keeping a relationship alive.
Rarely revived these days, despite its minimal single-set, three-actor requirements, LUV is currently being dusted off at the Plaza Theatre in Manalapan. Its acute observations and comic zingers are still in evidence, but the overly broad production makes the evening less about the challenges of sustaining a marriage and more about sustaining a whimsical conceit.
Guest director Andrew Rogow has three talented performers, but he either encourages or allows them to mug their way through the play, losing its already tenuous hold on reality and choking off much of the potential laughter.
Schisgal, who later co-wrote the movie Tootsie, constructs here a romantic triangle between two reunited school chums and the woman they toss from one to the other.
On a Manhattan bridge, messy, morose, unloved Harry Berlin (Steven J. Carroll) has come, intent on jumping to his death. Fortunately for him ― perhaps ― he is spotted by solvent, conventional, long married and long miserable Milt Manville (Avi Hoffman), who sees a solution for both of them. He introduces Harry to his wife Ellen (Patti Gardner), a no-nonsense, overeducated pragmatist, hoping they will fall in love, even though they are clearly all wrong for each other.
In fact, they do plummet into bliss, at least until intermission. By the second act, Harry and Ellen are supremely unhappy with each other. And when Ellen runs into Milt again on the bridge, they quickly hatch a plan to push Harry to his death so they can get together again.
Naturally, the scheme goes awry, but before it does Schisgal tosses in some clever verbal vaudeville material, which also could have used a more subtle touch. LUV’s message is just as relevant today as it was 48 years ago, but you would never be convinced of its comic potential from this Plaza production.
LUV, The Plaza Theatre, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan, through Sunday, Dec. 30. Tickets: $45. Call: (561) 588-1820.
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After four performances were scratched by a labor dispute between the Kravis Center and the local stagehands’ union, the Tony Award-winning dynamo Jersey Boys opened over the weekend with no signs of stress from the strike.
As it proved in its first visit here in 2010, this musical biography of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is a very entertaining show, jam-packed with the pop group’s song hits, from Sherry to Big Girls Don’t Cry to Walk Like a Man and on and on. But what sets Jersey Boys apart from most jukebox musicals ― that justifiably maligned lazy genre ― is the dark-toned history of the group, told with dramatic punch, humor and more than a few f-bombs by Broadway novices Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice.
Still, road tours tend to lose their impact with successive visits, as the physical production, cast size or other corners begin to experience cuts. The current production is crisp and fresh, with a well-drilled, talented cast that not only delivers the Four Seasons sound with an air of authenticity, but has the acting chops to convey the group’s conflicts behind the scenes.
Taking a cue from the quartet’s name, the show is divided into four seasons, with the narration divided among the four principals, each of whom tells the story a little differently.
Director Des McAnuff gives the show a cinematic flow, aided by the precision performance moves devised by choreographer Sergio Trujillo on the kinetic set from Klara Zieglerova.
Brad Weinstock is the latest to fill Valli’s shoes, having the necessary diminutive stature and a freakish, high-pitched, nasal voice. The rest of the group ― Jason Kappus, Brandon Andrus and Colby Foytik ― back him up vocally as required and also handle the occasional spotlight solos.
Musically, Jersey Boys works as a stroll down memory lane for the Baby Boomer demographic, but its appeal is much wider than that. Theatergoers of all ages probably are familiar with the Four Seasons’ play list, and even if they are not, the group’s struggles, conflicts and setbacks should be enough to hook them into this show business morality tale.
JERSEY BOYS, Kravis Center Dreyfoos Hall, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Jan. 6. Tickets: From $35 and up. Call: (561) 832-7469.