Edward Albee’s play, A Delicate Balance, opens the Aurora Theatre Company’s 20thseason. Anne Darragh, a member of the ensemble, said she’s delighted to at the Aurora again, and happy to be working with Tom Ross, the artistic director of the theater, who is directing A Delicate Balance.
“My experience of seeing his productions is he has a sensitivity for material that is quirky or difficult,” she said about Ross. “He can illuminate it in a way that’s astonishing and riveting and surprising. He’s particularly great at early modernists like Albee and Pinter and Tennessee Williams.”
Darragh finds the 1966 play about Tom and Agnes, who are visited by their friends Edna and Harry, timely because of the feeling of fear in the play.
“We have fled some unknown terror from our house which is not explained,” she said about her character, Edna. “As Americans we live under a constant low level fear. I feel some of it is middle class anxiety, but it’s kind of crazy. What do we have to be so scared of?”
Charles Dean, another Aurora veteran who got involved with the theater when it started 20 year’s ago, is also glad to be back at the theater where he has done several plays over the years.
Dean said he was drawn to the Aurora when it started two decades ago.
“Writing was a big part of what this new theater was about,” he said. “The trend at that time was directors and concepts.”
Dean, like Darragh, said he is happy for the chance to work again with the leads in the play, Ken Grantham, a co-founder of the theater company, and Kimberly King, the Aurora’s first leading lady. The two are married and now manage a B&B outside of Seattle.
“They’re dear friends of mine,” Dean said. “I respect and adore them, and this gives me a chance to reunite with them.”
The Pulitzer Prize- winning play engages audiences, Dean says.
“It’s Albee’s dissection of the upper middle class American family in the 60s,” he said. “All the principals end up searching and trying to redefine what their lives mean.”
Darragh says the combination of a great play, working with old friends, and the intimate space of the Aurora, mean going to work is a joy.
“I’m in heaven,” she said.
A Delicate Balance plays September 2 – October 9.
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