Albee is progressing. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was about the emptiness that surrounds and threatens to swallow our relationships; Tiny Alice was about the void lurking behind our deepest beliefs; now, A Delicate Balance is about the nothingness, the bare nothingness of it all—it is a play about nothing…. [The] nothingness—perhaps more accurately nothingness—of Albee's play is petty, self-indulgent, stationary. Albee's nothing is as dull as anything. (p. 96)
I am tired of this mythical "meaningless world" when the playwright fails to create or suggest any outer world (one isolated reference to income taxes might as well have been to Chinese calligraphy), and when he neglects to indicate what meaningfulness might have been before it got mislaid. This posturing play abounds in the cocktail-party profundities and family-reunion soundings that bloated up Eliot's drama, but at least Eliot was, however flatfootedly, after some sort of myth or metaphysic. (pp. 97-8)
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