Dull and Void?

Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” is much ado about nothingness. Can a play probing the comfortable, or at least easily sustainable, emptiness into which its characters have nestled be made to grab an audience?

The key creative cogs in South Coast Repertory’s production of “A Delicate Balance” are not only betting they can make emptiness dramatic, but they think they can point toward a hopeful way out of the void. Director Martin Benson and lead actors Linda Gehringer and Nicholas Hormann believe that, by play’s end, the unhappy family it concerns has confronted and understood its hollowness, and may be ready to upset the deadening balance that governs its life.

Albee introduces us first to Agnes and Tobias, a couple approaching 60 who live in one of the tonier suburbs of New York City. They are tended by servants and apparently have been all their lives. Their days are open agendas devoid of the need to do anything whatsoever. Albee has expelled from this play the least hint of the working life of career, ambition, economic necessity and usefulness to society.

Agnes fills the time with talk, and glorious talk it is. She speaks in ornate, perfectly controlled sentences that wind about through subordinate clauses and digressions, always circling with perfect Henry Jamesian grammatical correctness back to the initial thought. Acute articulateness is her shield and her tool, a way of shaping a world that has no compelling form. She needs a shield because her ne’er-do-well alcoholic sister, Claire, shares the house and a good piece of her martini-loosened mind. Claire’s blunt, bilious wit is a torment for Agnes and a humorous treat for the audience.

Tobias seems a vague, amiable sort. Mixology seems to be his main occupation; meanwhile, he tries to, if not exactly pacify the warring sisters, at least duck the ricochets.

We find as the play goes on that there are long-standing heartbreaks, suspicions and resentments dividing these three--but they have made the accommodations necessary to sustain what the title says they have.

The sudden return of Agnes and Tobias’ daughter, seeking refuge from her fourth failed marriage, is a strain, but in ordinary circumstances one capable of accommodation as well. What upsets the balance is the arrival of Edna and Harry, Agnes and Tobias’ best friends for ages. They have been driven from their own comfortable home by some sudden, inexplicable, scary existential void that just crept up on them one calm evening. They arrive not as guests needing temporary lodging and a bit of comforting, but as refugees determined never to return home but to live permanently with their old friends.

Time to Make a Choice

At last, Agnes and Tobias face necessity. They must weigh their loyalties and their values. They must make a decision.

“But in the end,” New York Times critic Walter Kerr wrote in his review of the original 1966 production starring Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, “how do you get hold of hollowness, how do you flesh out what is drained of flesh and create suspense out of what isn’t there?”

Kerr respectfully concluded that Albee had failed, and although the play won the first of its author’s three Pulitzer Prizes, it had a fairly short initial run.

Perhaps our appetite for emptiness has grown since then. A 1996 Broadway revival of “A Delicate Balance” was a critically acclaimed hit. And at South Coast Rep, director Benson and veteran actors Gehringer and Hormann, the show’s Agnes and Tobias, believe there is a strong dramatic core where Kerr saw hollowness.

“Maybe that’s the definition of drama itself: It’s exploring that emptiness,” Hormann, distinguished looking with neatly sweptback whitening hair, said during a recent interview at the theater’s bar. This is the Los Angeles resident’s eighth role at South Coast.

The three see the play, whose action takes place from a Friday night to a Sunday morning, not as a plunge into insurmountable emptiness but as a long weekend’s journey into daylight.

‘Wonder of Daylight’

Gehringer, a Laguna Beach resident and sometime “Ally McBeal” guest star, is playing her fifth part at SCR. She points to Agnes’ curtain-closing speech: “What I find most astonishing, I think, is the wonder of daylight. . . . [the ellipses here represent several Agnesian rhetorical zigzags] Come now; we can begin the day.”

“There is that sense when people talk about this play that it is very empty, it leaves you with a very down feeling,” Gehringer says. “We all very much believe, and we would like people to believe, that possibility has been opened for [the characters], as opposed to, ‘Well, here we sit for the rest of our lives.’ ”

Gehringer saw the New York City revival with Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard, Elaine Stritch and Marybeth Hurt and found it “an uplifting evening in the theater. It’s not that I remember specifics really, just that it was a great night, and very funny.”

Hormann hasn’t seen the play and tried to bone up by renting the 1973 film version; Albee scripted the movie, but Hormann found that it lacked the humor of the play.

“People mention the emptiness or hollowness that’s apparently there, but what keeps surprising me is how I respond with deep emotional connections,” Hormann said. “Sometimes at the most inappropriate moments I’ll find myself weeping in rehearsals.”

One of those is a memorable sequence in which Tobias tells how his affectionate cat spurned him for no reason, and how he tried to win back its love to no avail.

Among Hormann’s challenges is making Tobias more than a washed-out cipher. Taking out a spiral notebook, he read some comments from Albee he had jotted down to use for guidance: “ ‘He is not smug or arrogant or cowardly or a figure of fun, or ridiculous, shallow, asleep or stupid. We must always sense in him a reserve that is not used and may never be used.’ ”

Gehringer would seem to have a daunting task merely to learn her lines, with all their elaborate curlicues of syntax and thought.

“It reminded me very much of when I learned Blanche in ‘Streetcar,’ which is very similar,” she said. “It is so beautifully written that it is very easy to learn. But there is such a density in the language that to make it truly expressive to the audience is what I consider the greater challenge.”

A Director’s Challenge

Among Benson’s challenges as director are getting audiences to tune in once more to a bunch of familiar theatrical types: wealthy, idle, urbane and frequently tipsy Northeastern country club WASPs. At one point, he thought of adding views of palm trees to the set to imply that the play was taking place in genteel precincts closer to home--say, Old Pasadena.

“There can be a bias from one coast against the other: ‘Oh, this is one of those snooty Connecticut-type plays where all these rich people talk about this and that,’ the A.R. Gurney world. Finally, the play is universal. It is not unique to people slightly northeast of New York City.”

In fact, Benson thinks “A Delicate Balance,” with its portrait of lives blessed or cursed with lots of leisure and little necessity, could hit very close to home with retirees and near-retirees, probably the largest segment of the South Coast Repertory audience.

“What do you do with your life? Do you stagnate or grow? Do your relationships settle into habit? It may be great to have dinner on the table at 7 in the evening, play your golf on Saturday morning, tend the lawn and garden a little bit. It’s comfortable and it’s become habit. But is it fulfilling? I think that is an issue that’s eternally important.”

Finally, SCR and Albee

Of course, many of us would, if it were only possible, gladly risk the potentially dulling impact of life on Easy Street. But Gehringer thinks Albee, who was raised as an adopted child in a troubled but privileged home, has enhanced his play’s moral and emotional clarity by separating his characters from daily necessity.

“With people of privilege, where money is not in question, that in a way strips it down just to the facts of their [moral and emotional] life. If you don’t have money, that can be the excuse for why the compromises are being made. Well, you strip that need away, and then suddenly ‘It’s just about us and our lives, we’re free to make any choice we want to.’ ”

Though Albee was America’s hottest young playwright during the mid-1960s, when Benson and creative partner David Emmes founded South Coast Repertory, the theater had never done one of his plays until now. It wasn’t a case of disregard for Albee’s work, Benson said.

In the early 1970s they wanted to stage “Tiny Alice,” which is now having a well-received New York revival, the latest triumph in an Albee renaissance dating to his 1994 Pulitzer for the autobiographical “Three Tall Women.” But South Coast was then a struggling small company and its leaders didn’t think they would be able to get permission from Albee, who insists on the right to approve directors and casts before granting production rights to his plays.

“I really can’t come up with a reason,” Benson said, for why SCR, which became a major regional theater in the late 1970s, had not previously plunged into the Albee oeuvre. “He has, I think, four really extraordinary plays, and ‘A Delicate Balance’ is my favorite.”

SHOW TIMES

“A Delicate Balance,” South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Previews through Thursday; regular performances begin Friday. $18 to $49, with a pay-what-you-will matinee this Saturday. Through Feb. 11. (714) 708-5555.