In the opening scene of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, a well-to-do husband and wife are enjoying drinks in their plush living room.
As staged on designer Daniel Ettinger's beautifully appointed set at Everyman Theatre, everything about the scene bespeaks comfort - the crystal decanters on the bar, the gilded wall moldings, not to mention the husband's fragrant pipe, the wife's gleaming pearls, or even her genial musings on what would become of him if she went mad. It's a picture of contentment - life as "a rolling, pleasant land," as the wife, Agnes, describes it to her husband, Tobias.
But we soon discover that there are several unpleasant bumps in that terrain. There's Agnes' alcoholic sister, who lives with them, and the couple's 36-year-old daughter, who's about to move back in, as her fourth marriage disintegrates.
The greatest threat to Agnes and Tobias' peaceful home life, however, comes from outside their little family circle. It comes from their best friends, who arrive on their doorstep seeking sanctuary from an inexplicable terror that has suddenly afflicted them both.
In 1966, when A Delicate Balance premiered, the notion of terror may have seemed hypothetical, even surreal. Today, however, when the words "terrorist" and "threat" show up in just about every newscast and newspaper, Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama suddenly seems more real than surreal.
As director Vincent Lancisi notes in the program, this disturbing timeliness is the reason he decided to revive the play. And his production certainly succeeds on that level. As far removed as most theatergoers may feel from Agnes and Tobias' posh household with its unseen staff of servants, there's a creepy immediacy to the sense of fear that their friends, Harry and Edna, bring into it.
And there's additional relevance to Lancisi's accomplished, but not flawless, production. On an obvious level, A Delicate Balance asks if there are limits to what we would do for our dearest friends, and what the boundaries are between family and friends.
Lancisi's production, however, probes beneath the obvious to the play's more profound questions about the dangerous isolation - today it'd be called cocooning - of the individual and the family.
Anne Stone's rather haughty, self-satisfied Agnes and Bill Hamlin's reserved Tobias are barely able to reach out to each other. As conventionally happy as their marriage may appear, they are people who have built up an extremely tenuous modus operandi. While they've made concessions for Claire's drunken episodes and Julia's marital upheavals, the pattern of their existence cannot withstand further disruption. The arrival of Judy Simmons' quivering Edna and Richard Pilcher's gruff but unnerved Harry isn't merely a test of friendship, it's a test of the very fiber of Agnes and Tobias' collective being.
Given her parents' emotional barriers, it's not surprising that Julia - the most unsympathetic character, played by a forgivably shrill Deborah Hazlett - can't maintain a marriage. In many ways, hard-drinking, weak-willed Claire is the shrewdest member of the household, a quality that surfaces strongly in Rosemary Knower's performance once you get beyond her fright-wig hair, heavy makeup and bohemian costume.
Almost all of the monologues in this complex drama are potential minefields for actors, and Lancisi's cast navigates them on a scale ranging from adequate to impressive, though some of the staging looks overly posed.
Albee's thorny play isn't merely about "a delicate balance," it's also a delicate balance to stage. For the most part, Everyman achieves that balance, at the same time that it adds new resonance to the troubling questions that follow you out of the theater.
A Delicate Balance
Where: Everyman Theatre, 1727 N. Charles St.
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; matinees at 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through Dec. 22
Tickets: $15-$25
Call: 410-752-2208