Metaphor in New York
A few days ago, before embarking on a week of fresh frontier works as part of several festivals now playing in New York - Coil , Under the Radar , Prototype and others - I visited two classics of the American theatre: A Delicate Balance and Into the Woods . Edward Albee's 1966 Pulitzer winning play about an unnamed terror is running at the Golden Theater with a starry cast including Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Lindsay Duncan. It's a curious experience. It's the type of production you would never see on an Australian profession al stage - a perfectly realised WASP living room with a curtain rising and falling on tableaux at beginning and ends of acts and scenes. The performances are mostly disappointing. Few of the cast seem to be living in the play's situation and instead rely on presenting its ideas. Lithgow's extraordinary speech about a pet cat he had put down for avoiding his company and refusing to purr is an exception. So too are perfor...