27 January 2025
I will admit that the only reason I knew the name Edward Albee is that it is frequently an answer in crosswords. Last night, I saw a production of Island City Stage of Albee’s A Delicate Balance. It was very well done. Albee won his first of three Pulitzers for this play.
Kurt mentioned Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe and wondered if he wrote the play. I didn’t know. He did write the play. I think everyone knows Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made the movie famous but not sure many people know the playwright.
Once the play began, I could see similarities between it and WAVW. Although the play had some great laugh lines (thanks to Claire) it was mostly drama about families and friends.
If you are not familiar with the play, there’s an excellent breakdown on Wikipedia. In this production, I thought Claire, played by Betty Ann Hunt Strain, was exceptional. Also a standout was Tobias, played by Tom Wahl. Overall, the cast was excellent. That’s a lot of dialogue the cast has to master! The stage design was remarkable for a small playhouse. The director of the playhouse told the audience the set cost $20k.
There were several comments from the audience as to how they wished their house looked like this. I particularly liked the white chair. Like WAVW, there’s a lot of drinking going on.
Island City Stage is a very small venue with high quality productions. It has great support from the community, receives numerous grants, and has several major benefactors. The quality of the acting is as good as anything I’ve seen in New York.
Tom, Kurt and I arrived at the Island City Stage offices at 3:45 pm for Mimosa Sunday. It’s the last Sunday that the play is produced. Food and drink are supplied by a sponsor and the spread is quite large and varied so theirs food for everyone. What’s nice is you get into conversations with people you don’t know and even run into a few friends you do know. I bumped into Jose who used to work the desk at Stonewall Library and Archives. It was great to see him.
We were going to go across the street to Union Bar for after dinner drinks but the play let out around 8 pm and three old men decided to make it a night and go to bed. As we were heading to the Jeep, we met Betty Hunt Strain who played Claire. We complimented her performance and she was very appreciative.
I dropped Tom and Kurt off and headed home.
It was a great afternoon/evening with Tom and Kurt.
Island City Stage’s next production is Fat Ham, a takeoff of Hamlet.
Stay tuned!
P.S. I managed 1.5 miles this morning.
