Whisky Before Breakfast

A Delicate Balance. A character in the new play with which Edward Albee opens the Broadway season is somewhat shocked to find himself drinking whisky before breakfast. Says another character reassuringly: "Think of it as very late at night." The lateness of the night, the thirst of the soul, the solitary anguish of the self--these have always been the prevailing mood winds of Albee's plays. But he cannot construct a credible plot in which to trap them, and he fails again in Balance.

With gracious manners, in a spacious drawing room, a fiftyish couple are leading an embalmer's parody of life. Tobias (Hume Cronyn) looks like a pair of rumpled pajamas; Agnes (Jessica Tandy) has the cool, waxy elegance of an unlit candelabra. Their 36-year-old daughter has drifted away from four husbands. Agnes' unmarried sister Claire (Rosemary Murphy) drifts blissfully on a sea of alcohol. Like autumn leaves, they celebrate drift, having forgotten how to cling.

These numb people are suddenly intruded on by another couple, close friends of 40 years' standing. They claim to have been routed out of their own home by an onrush of mutual terror, left unexplained by Albee, and they propose to settle in. Words are exchanged and exchanged and exchanged, but no deeds, and the test of friendship ends with the familiar knowledge which unduly saddens Albee, that the self is a castle without a drawbridge.

Edward Albee can be trusted as a bartender, an unleasher of tirades of aggression, a put-down comedian, and a lover of English whose sentences curl with the involuted beauty of a sea shell, but when he puts on his thinking cap, he is a poseur. To embrace everyone is to be no one. A Delicate Balance is a wish for oblivion posing as a plea for love, and its fine cast and funny lines cannot hide its phony bones.

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