Claire from A Delicate Balance -- An Email Exchange

Context
A former student emailed me about Albee's Claire and she gave me permission to post our subsequent exchange, which I do with minor editing. Ideas are scattered, therefore, and undeveloped; but I thought the spirit of the exchange was worth that shortcoming.

The Emails
Evelyn (Not her real name):
So what's the deal with CLAIRE in A Delicate Balance? Now that I'm her age, and know a few struggling alcoholics, I have more questions than ever.... What is the true vulnerability that keeps her from trying to function on her own? What keeps her living with Agnes and Tobias? When did she get permanently installed? After the death of the boy? Was the affair of the wet July after the boy's death?
Yes, she's funny, and wise and acerbic and all that, but she has made MAJOR compromises to maintain this relationship. Did she try and work and the booze kept her from any sort of success.... What makes her feel that she is entitled to A and T's care? Did the Dad of Agnes and Claire have anything to do with this? There is a sentence about his deathbed wish...?

David (My real name):
There are lots of opposites delicately balanced in the play. The one that strikes deepest for me and that links all the scenes and the acts together is the balance between Rights and Responsibilities. This is the organizing oppositional balance for all the others: self v. others; family v. friends; parent v. child; etc. And where are the lines drawn? When does friend become invader? when does child become adult? What rights and responsibilities does that imply? What's the balance between doing for others and protecting yourself? etc. And behind it all, what is it that you're protecting?

It's important not that the characters are of a certain age, but that they are of a certain socio-economic class and are retired and no longer actively engaged in life and living -- and there is a question about how vital their engagement has ever been. They've made their compromises and they are living a relatively, though delicately (sorry), balanced life with them. (Tobias asks the gardener about the new orchids for the greenhouse; Agnes checks with the cook about the evening's dinner plans, stops at Claire's door to listen if she's awake. Perhaps without needing to say anything, she hands Tobias the empty brandy snifter she finds on the stairs.) Harry and Edna will challenge the structure of that life and force Agnes and Tobias to come to irrevocable decisions about this delicate balance. (I've always appreciated the metaphor of the mobile for family: each piece strategically placed to keep it all in balanced suspension. Add pressure anywhere and all pieces must adjust in an effort to maintain balance.) I like that the play pulls back from that final irrevocable confrontation by letting Harry and Edna upstairs arrive at the decision to leave just as downstairs Agnes and Tobias are reaching a decision about what they -- he -- will do. So Tobias's "aria" becomes not so much a confrontation with Harry as a plea for Harry to give Tobias a chance to Do the Right Thing -- even if doing so might bring disaster on his delicately balanced family life -- an easier "aria" to sing when you know that Harry and Edna are leaving.

It's pretty clear that Claire never quite lived up to the standard that her older sister set as a daughter, a girl friend, a mate, etc. And since Agnes surely was Miss Perfect, it's not hard to imagine slightly younger sister Claire becoming Miss Imperfect. If Claire wanted to, she could go to the country club Christmas party and dress and act just like all the other women, but long ago she fell before their judgments and Agnes's expectations and she began to parade her failings rather than hiding them. Why?
Yes, she did once live alone, though she has never worked because she has never needed to work. But living alone was a failure, no? The description Agnes gives of Claire's life on her own is an accurate one. And, yes, on his deathbed, their father made Agnes promise she would take care of Claire. And so Claire has a shelter, a home, a safe haven here without having to be personally responsible for maintaining it; balance that 'right' with the 'responsibility' of gratitude to her sister as well as some attempt to keep her excesses in check and you get the major forces of her life. So, yes, she's entitled. She's also needful of this. Dad knew it and Agnes knows it. And although it's not possible to pinpoint the exact time/occasion that Claire came to live with them, it has been long enough that her part in the mobile balance of this family has been firmly established.
I'm not sure that there is a "true vulnerability that keeps her from functioning on her own" beyond what the play suggests in the lifelong living in Perfect Agnes's shadow, etc. I think you can add that, given the kind of outsider's objectivity Claire has (It's not for nothing that she's named 'Claire'), she can see things clearly but can't find enough strength to live as if she didn't.

After the death of the paternal grandmother, Albee's adoptive mother and father moved into the house that provides the setting for this play. Mrs. Albee had an alcoholic younger sister who often made extended visits as a houseguest there. Imagine the young Edward Albee -- with the passion and the objectivity of an artist -- witnessing his father's acquiescence to his mother in all things as she destroyed his relationship with his father. He hated his mother -- and she him -- and it was many years after her death that he wrote Three Tall Women and came to some reconciliation with his feelings about her. He was an artist, a social activist, someone who wanted to matter, etc. -- and surely the privileged and essentially meaningless life of his family must have caused despair as well as anger.
Albee said, "These people [the characters of A Delicate Balance] are teetering between being able to survive and being thrown into chaos". And for me that describes the greater existentially philosophically huger reality behind "Rights v. Responsibilities". Behind it all, as Agnes says, is "the deep sadness". The existential despair thing. The sense of lives lived not meaningfully, not productively. Emptiness. I think this is as important to the play and to the characters as the foot pedal bass line is important to the musical meaning of an organ piece.

Anyway, to respond to your other specific questions, Tobias does say to Agnes that he didn't want to have sex with her after Teddy's death so that she might be spared another pregnancy. So we might be able to imagine that the July Claire affair happened after that. Dunno if it's essential (or possible) to know for certain. (And regardless of when Claire came to live with them permanently, this incident suggests that she has always been an intimate part of their lives.)
You may be only six or seven years younger than Claire, but important to understanding the gulf between you and her is that she lives in a world that expects no real productive activity from any of them and so they create a cocoon that keeps the outside world away. Until Harry and Edna (Mitt and Ann? George and Barbara?) enter with their fear of imminent disaster.

Okay, but now the question is: What does the actor DO to turn all these ideas into expressive meaningful behavior?

Enough. I didn't think this through carefully, so feel free to find it inadequate to your needs. And feel free to pound further on my virtual door.

Evelyn:
I think the context of NON-PRODUCTIVE may be the most important touchstone for me. When I talk to my students, I remind them that knowing themselves is critical. In this case, knowing that EVELYN must at the end of the day Be Productive above all things, Claire will be a really interesting challenge for me. What if I, Evelyn, had no use? Couldn't Advocate, Teach, Parent, make lists, bake cookies, create, nurture, pick dog poop up, WHATEVER!!!!
I might drink. I often dream of being a more addictive personality, cuz I love a buzz, but my usefulness kicks in and I think about all that will not get done if I overdo.... WOW.

David:
Ohyes, you have lots of Claire capacities. You have the objective fifty-yard line pov, her delight in language, her ability to see the ironies, the incongruities, in others' lives -- and in her own. You early on loved the response you got from knocking people off balance with straight-talk -- shocking!
(How do you relate to Claire's relationship with family?)

Then try this: View your out-going motivation/need to DO, to Produce, to pick up dog poop, etc., as an addictive energy/need all on its own. Fuel it with the early Claire failure to live up to Agnes -- and you can turn your own driving energy into destructivve behavior. Improvise the first time Claire decided to get drunk in order to escape from being compared and found lacking. Was it a club dance? a fund-raiser? Did she try hard to succeed? Maybe there was a contest to sign up as many people as possible to donate to charity. And Claire seems to be winning. Then, of course, Agnes's tally is counted (Or something -- you create one that works for you). And Claire just finally decides whatthefuckwhybother and she gets roaring drunk. She gets attention. Noticed. And she gets to give them the finger at the same time as she gets finally to be the one in the spotlight.
Drink as an escape from -- what? and also as a way to get noticed, responded to. ("Oh, I am here! I exist!")

One more thing: It occurs to me that [the name of an actress with whom Evelyn was often in competition -- and who usually won] is your Agnes.

Evelyn:
Ouch.

David:
Ooooo, I didn't mean to ouch you. But if it makes creative sense, it's worth it....

Evelyn:
It was a good ouch!!

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Honey

Question:

About playing Honey in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf:

I've been thinking of the play like this: In the face of incontrovertible evidence that the world is not what you expected, that being born human is a cruel cruel fate and that life will ultimately kill you only after it's maimed and castrated you utterly... How do you proceed?  You laugh, you drink, you tell stories...

How do you make Staving Off the Existential Dread into a positive action based in another person?  Are you hoping for collusion in your delusion? Recruiting collaborators for your particular fantasy? And for Honey in particular, how do you not make her the "simp" she's said to be?  What are the defensive and offensive strategies of a "mouse"? What are its advantages?  

Response:

It's 1960. Pre pill. Pre Roe v. Wade. Pre lots of things for women. (See Mad Men. Imagine it without its illuminating contemporary perspective on gender behavior.)

What that implies may be harder to deal with for a contemporary actress playing Honey than for one playing Martha. And it's possible that a director who wants to address contemporary issues by updating attitudes a little will put some of that energy into the characterization of Honey. 

Honey’s fear of pregnancy and the way she deals with it spring immediately to mind as stuck a bit in the time period. But there it is and you have to confront it: She doesn't want to go through with birth. She can't tell Nick. She finds ways to deal with it appropriate for the times and for her social class.

One of the most shocking things about Martha when the play appeared was how direct and unapologetic she is. Tennessee Williams put women on stage for the first time as sexually passionate human beings. (Okay, for the first time since Euripides. Well, okay, maybe Shakespeare with Cleopatra. Okay, they're all played by men anyway.) But Williams' women spoke the lyrical, poetic, indirect language of the Southern Lady. 
Albee put Martha on stage with language no woman--and very few men--had ever spoken there. And certainly never anyone from the "educated classes". 

Martha smashed through all the "women's wiles" stuff and the conversational indirection that women were obliged to master. She said things that women not only shouldn't say, but things they had to pretend they didn't even think let alone know about. 
Martha struggles with the social and professional strait-jacketing of women, but she is wrestling and swearing and punching her way out without even being aware of the greater social implications of her actions.

Honey serves as a dramatic/thematic opposite to Martha. She’s not trying to wrestle and swear and punch her way out of anything. Honey has ambition but it is ambition for Nick's career. (Note the different relationship she and Martha have to this same situation.)  

What's most important to her? To see to it that Nick becomes the youngest departmental chairman the college has ever had--and someday the president of an Ivy League university. And so far, she's been pretty successful as the power behind that throne. 
She's the one who insists they go to George and Martha's after-party party. She knows it's important for Nick's positioning in departmental gamesmanship. I'll bet she bought a power tie just for tonight and she made him wear it.  
But she gets in way over her head with G and M. She can't possibly drink as much as they do; she can't possibly play the Manipulate Others games as well as they do. And she isn't remotely as smart and savvy as they are. 
And neither is Nick.

A contemporary actress might rather view Honey's mousy simpiness as the result of inadequate preparation for playing in the big leagues than as inherent simpy mousiness. We all have experience with people who seem like simps more for the way they act in social arenas they're ill-equipped for than for actual ingrained simpitude. 
Improvise determining aspects of Honey's early family life and social and cultural background--the play gives lots of clues. Pay attention to the roles women fulfill (daughter, wife, mother, homemaker) and the ways they must function in them. 
Not so much a simp, Honey becomes a rather ordinary woman who, through a combination of learned social maneuverings and blindered denial and escape tactics, has pursued her life goals and maintained the image of wife and potential mother her particular world expects. She has been living her life in the minor leagues and up to now she has managed fairly well. 

I'll bet the New Carthage College faculty wives don't see Honey as simpy but more small-town middle-Americany naive with tiny hints of way minor league Lady Macbeth--not the only faculty wife they know with that last characteristic.

Put her at this particular party on this particular night with this particularly extraordinary couple, however, and she can't possibly hold her own. She ends up acting in a way that, to George, makes her "sort of a simp in the long run". 

I've always believed that an actor can play any character with utter conviction so long as the character exists in a play whose themes the actor can support without reservation. I imagine playing a weak-willed, cowering, simpering, limp-wristed, self-hating, faggoty wimp of a man who vigorously supports parental abduction of gay children to send off to homosexual-reeducation-and-lesbian-curative camps--so long as he's in a play with themes I embrace. 

In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? one of the major themes lurking subterraneanly is the need for society and culture to recognize how much the world loses by not championing all of the capacities for substantive contribution that women possess. If you play Martha, you demonstrate those powerful capacities more or less directly; if you play Honey, you demonstrate the crippling, stifling effects of societal corseting--perhaps more poignantly in a female character who has little if any awareness of this reality. 
But if both actresses are motivated by a concern that culture and society truly recognize and truly value all people for their fundamental abilities without being blinded by such factors as gender, then it doesn't matter which character you play.

p.s. I regret any disappointment you may experience from my not dealing with Staving Off Existential Dread.