Island City Stage’s ‘A Delicate Balance’ is great theater

By AARON KRAUSE For Theatrical Musings

Although they are touching each other, you sense tension between Agnes (Patti Gardner) and Tobias (Tom Wahl) in Island City Stage’s first-rate production of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Delicate Balance.

Unless you have been hiding in a hole or cave somewhere, you know that we are living during an anxious time. In fact, maybe that is why you have been hiding.

Indeed, natural disasters, division, uncertainty, lies and ineptitude in government, illness, and violence can combine to cause an uneasy feeling that, at first, you may not be able to explain. Therefore, we can sympathize with fictional characters such as Harry and Edna in Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Delicate Balance. They leave their home after a fearful feeling envelops them, and they seek refuge in their best friends’ upscale suburban home. While we never learn the source of their anxiety, we may attribute their feelings to overwhelm or a general unease about life’s uncertainties and hardships – the kind we are experiencing today in 2025.

Harry and Edna, as well as other characters in A Delicate Balance, come to vibrant and believable life in Island City Stage’s (ICS) grand professional production of the play. Since the production opened on Jan. 16, many performances have sold out. And you may have a hard time finding tickets to the remaining performances. The production ends on Feb. 9. But if you value great acting, it pays to at least try to buy tickets. The production takes place in ICS’s intimate theater in Wilton Manors.

ICS has assembled a cast of top-notch South Florida performers for this production. If you frequently attend live theater productions in the region, surely you are familiar with names such as Patti Gardner, Tom Wahl, Margery Lowe, Christopher Dreeson, and Sabrina Lynn Gore. New York-based performer Betty Ann Hunt Strain, whom you may have recently seen as Boo in Boca Stage’s production of The Last Night of Ballyhoo, is also part of the cast.

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