Fireworks With the Power to Shatter

“Every honest work is a personal, private yowl,” playwright Edward Albee said early in his career, at the time of his off-Broadway success with “The American Dream” (1961). The enduring value of Albee’s finest achievements, however, hasn’t merely to do with their raw intensity or decibel level.

First impressions deceive: Albee’s first Broadway success, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1962), contains whole crazed passages that must be performed at top volume, top intensity, top everything. (Snarling academia demands it.) But there are other sorts of yowls. Some can barely be heard over the stirring of a martini pitcher, or the latest smiling insult--one of a million “horrid little revenges” exacted in a comfortable suburban home under invasion, both from within and without.

This is the tenor of Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” (1966). The new South Coast Repertory production makes that clear, from the first bit of veiled cocktail chat to the last.

It’s SCR’s first Albee, and like the superb 1996 Lincoln Center revival, this staging serves as a fine reacquaintance (or introduction) to one of this writer’s most penetrating works. It has fireworks, but true to Albee’s chosen John Cheeverish milieu, they’re not “Virginia Woolf” brand fireworks. Their colors are subtle, but richer.

The marriage of Agnes (Linda Gehringer) and Tobias (Nicholas Hormann) is Albee’s nominal subject. The marriage has settled into a groove of moneyed WASP pleasantries. That groove has been disrupted lately, however, by their current house guest, Agnes’ alcoholic sister, Claire (Kandis Chappell). There’s another guest on the way, daughter Julia (Rene Augesen), on the rocks of her fourth marriage.

Two more visitors appear as well, from outside the bosom and neglect of family. Without warning, Agnes and Tobias’ best friends Harry (Richard Doyle) and Edna (Hope Alexander) show up at their door. Something in the quiet of their home and gray lives has spooked them. Sitting home one evening (“just sitting home,” Harry says, more than once), they were struck by a nameless terror. A sense of . . . time slipping? Time wasted?

And so they decide to move in with their best friends. Obliquely, wittily, “A Delicate Balance” dramatizes a simple yet elusive thing: stasis. It does so by way of guests who will not leave, and who gradually assert themselves in threatening ways (threatening to the returning daughter Julia most of all).

But if that’s all that Albee was up to here, the play would date pretty badly as a piece of gently stylized absurdism. It doesn’t. The potentially schematic premise--the boozy seer Claire watches as events peel back the placid surface of two brittle, dangerously cool marriages--grows ever deeper.

In parts of Act 3, to my taste, Albee over-explicates, falling prey to a less mysterious brand of dramaturgy. But only a bit. His writing here has the energy of his earlier works and the precision of what’s to come. The musicality of it sings. “You return to your nest from your latest disaster, dispossessed, and suddenly dispossessing; screaming the house down, clawing at order,” Edna says to Julia at one point. Albee makes the poetry in such passages eloquent--and fully, sharply felt.

The look of director Martin Benson’s production, as created by scenic designer Thomas Buderwitz, is at once classy and rather oppressive. The angle of the beamed ceiling feels menacing, as did John Lee Beatty’s Lincoln Center production. Benson and his ensemble respect the pace and dynamics of Albee’s three-act structure.

It’s a strong cast. Gehringer’s Agnes allows perhaps too much venom to seep out too early in the game, but she has an excellent ear for Albee’s rhythms. Her controlled staccato line readings work in pleasing harmony with Hormann’s amused, legato approach. It’s some of the best work both performers have done on local stages.

Chappell has the showier role, the lioness’ share of the wisecracks, and she’s spot-on. As the insinuating house guests, Doyle and Alexander finesse the surface blandness very shrewdly. Effectively, Augesen’s Julia recedes into her bratty, pained childhood. As in “Virginia Woolf,” the death of a young boy figures heavily into the characters’ current state of gradually acknowledged crisis.

Audiences tend to file out of “Virginia Woolf” like Romans leaving a gladiator battle. With “A Delicate Balance,” it’s different. You detect a lot of indicted glances and a more genuinely unsettled vibe. In the name of maintaining order, Albee’s play says, without banging the point on the noggin, we say and do some appallingly misjudged things. And what we don’t say and do can really hurt us.

*

* “A Delicate Balance,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 11. $28-$49. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

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A Delicate Balance

Linda Gehringer: Agnes

Nicholas Hormann: Tobias

Rene Augesen: Julia

Kandis Chappell: Claire

Hope Alexander: Edna

Richard Doyle: Harry

Written by Edward Albee. Directed by Martin Benson. Scenic design by Thomas Buderwitz. Costumes by Walker Hicklin. Lighting by Tom Ruzika. Stage manager Randall K. Lum.