The Strategy of Madness: An Analysis of Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance"

Abstract

In 1962 Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? narrowly avoided winning the Pulitzer Prize. Although the previous award had gone to an insipid musical, no prize was offered in 1962-63. When another of Albee's plays is awarded the self-same prize some five years later, then, the critic is posed with an obvious problem. Have the Committee, one of whose members reportedly called Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? filthy play, become more catholic in their taste or has Albee compromised the values and the manner which had formerly made his work unacceptable? answer, I believe, is that Albee has achieved what is clearly a rare distinction. He has played a part, small though it is, in the long process of educating the Pulitzer Prize Committee. For while A Delicate Balance is without doubt a lesser play than Virginia Woolf there seems little doubt that it does demonstrate Albee's continued determination to bring to the American theater both the lucidity and passion it has so often lacked and that desire to experiment without which any theater is in danger of vegetating. Where Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had examined the impotence of contemporary society, A Delicate Balance attempts to penetrate to the fear of which this impotence is merely one expression. Rather like T. S. Eliot's Family Reunion it tries to delve below the surface of a precarious urbanity to the spiritual terror which exists just below the surface. In Eliot's words it is concerned with The backward look behind the assurance . . . the backward half-look / Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.'