On Reception of the Play

"Robert Brustein, writing in The New Republic, found the play to be little more than "an old house which an interior decorator has tried to furnish with reproductions and pieces bought at auction" while Richard Gilman, in Newsweek, attacked what he saw as the "inflated dialogue," the "kind of cliché that is all too prominent in Albee's rhetoric"" (Bigsby 223).

Rooney, in his review, says that Albee "maps out a picture of upper-middle-class complacency and then mercilessly confronts his characters with the depths of their denial, in action that unfolds from Friday night through Sunday morning.”

“A Delicate Balance is the sort of play that might be written if there were no theater. It exists outside itself, beside itself, aloof from itself, as detached from the hard floor of the Martin Beck, where it opened last night, as its alarmed characters are detached from themselves. The effect is deliberate—because it is precisely hollowness that is most on Mr. Albee’s mind—and it is offered to us on an elegantly lacquered empty platter the moment the curtain goes up.”
—Walter Kerr, The New York Times

“Albee is too able a playwright to really lose his audience. Yet where this should grip us, it merely holds us with a limp but unreleasing hand, like an acquaintance too long leaving.”
—Norman Nadel, World-Journal Tribune

“The fourth in a series of disappointments that Albee has been turning out since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, [A Delicate Balance], like its predecessors, suffers from a borrowed style and a hollow center. It also suggests that Albee's talent for reproduction has begun to fail him until by now the labels on his lendings are all but exposed to public view. Reviewers have already noted the stamp of T. S. Eliot on A Delicate Balance … and it is quite true that Albee, like Eliot before him, is now trying to invest the conventional drawing-room comedy with metaphysical significance. But where Eliot was usually impelled by a religious vision, Albee seems to be stimulated by mere artifice, and the result is emptiness, emptiness, emptiness.”
—Robert Brustein, The Third Theatre

“I sat there in the Martin Beck Theater sometimes all but hypnotized by the flow of words, sometimes amused at a pert and suddenly deft observation of human frailties and encounters. But I also sat there wishing heartily that Mr. Albee would come to the point and tell us, in a playwright’s explicit terms, just what he wanted to say.”
—Whitney Bolton, Morning Telegraph

“Edward Albee’s new play is a dictionary with neither definitions nor order—a pile of verbiage accumulated for the sake of a trivial and naïve point. Just what this collection was doing in the mouths of various, well-meaning actors is not clear. Nor is the absence of Mr. Albee’s sense of the stage explainable.”
—Martin Gottfried, Women’s Wear Daily