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<b>Weathervane Playhouse’s 80<sup>th</sup> Season Celebration Continues with the</b></p>
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<b>Pulitzer Prize-Winning “A Delicate Balance”</b></p>
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<b><i>Domestic Superficiality and Jolting Existential Questions Take Center Stage in Edward Albee’s Dark Comedy </i></b></p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"> Weathervane Playhouse, Akron’s hometown theater, continues the celebration of its 80<sup>th</sup> season with the Pulitzer Prize-winning play
<i>A Delicate Balance</i> — presented live on stage from March 26 to April 12, 2015.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Written by the celebrated and controversial playwright Edward Albee,
<i>A Delicate Balance</i> is a dark comedy in which the carefully controlled existence of two complacent suburbanites is forever shattered by their family and friends over the course of one eventful weekend. The production is directed by Craig Joseph.<span style="font: 12.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
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</span>Agnes and Tobias are a perfectly normal, upper middle-class married couple. With a cushion of wealth to protect them, they would appear to have the best of everything: a beautifully furnished home, the finest china and the most tasteful furniture.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">But the underpinnings of such a comfortable life have begun to come loose. Live-in sister-in-law Claire drinks too much and delights in trading caustic remarks with Agnes and Tobias. And Julia,
Agnes and Tobias’s 36-year-old daughter, has returned home after her fourth failed marriage, a lost child seeking the comfort of hearth and home.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">The sudden appearance of Harry and Edna, the neighbors and best friends of Agnes and Tobias, further threatens the rigidly restrained order of suburban splendor. Harry and Edna insist that they
cannot return to their own home, due to an undefined “terror” that has gripped them. With their equilibrium thus upended, can Agnes and Tobias continue to maintain their “delicate balance?”</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">A drama packed with psychological complexity,
<i>A Delicate Balance</i> takes audiences on a careening ride from domestic superficiality to a jolting confrontation with life’s most existential questions.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><b><i>A DELICATE BALANCE
</i>Performance and Ticket Information</b></p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><i>A Delicate Balance
</i>plays on the Weathervane Playhouse Founders Theater stage between March 26 and April 12, 2015. The performance days and times are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. There will be no performance on Easter Sunday,
April 5.</p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">The low-cost preview performance is Thursday, March 26 at 7:30 p.m.; the official opening-night performance is Friday, March 27 at 8 p.m.</p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Tickets for the March 26 preview performance only are $16 for adults and seniors, $10 for children (ages 17 and younger) and $8 for college students.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">For performances <span style="text-decoration: underline">
after</span> March 26, the following ticket prices apply: $22 for adults, $20 for seniors (for Thursday and Sunday performances only), $10 for children (ages 17 and younger) and $11 for college students. Additional discounts for groups of 12 or larger are also
available. </p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">The Weathervane Playhouse Box Office is open Mondays between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays between 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. and is also open beginning one hour before each performance.
For tickets, visit or call the Weathervane Box Office at 330-836-2626 during Box Office hours or buy tickets online at
<a href="http://www.weathervaneplayhouse.com">www.weathervaneplayhouse.com</a>.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Content advisory: due its adult language and themes, the play is best enjoyed by audiences ages 16 and older.</p>
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<p style="margin: 5.0px 0.0px 5.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><b>ABOUT THE SHOW’S DIRECTOR</b></p>
<p style="margin: 5.0px 0.0px 5.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">A native of Canton,
<b>CRAIG JOSEPH</b> was bitten by the theater bug at an early age, and could be found producing short plays and puppet shows in the backyard with the neighborhood kids. After receiving a fantastic arts education in Plain Local Schools, Craig pursued his Bachelors
in English and Theology at Wake Forest University (all the while acting and directing), and then went on to receive a Masters in Directing from Northwestern University. A 10-year sojourn in Chicago garnered him professional directing credits with Writers Theatre,
White Horse Theatre, and TimeLine Theatre, among others. Contemporaneously, he acted occasionally and wrote several plays, short fiction pieces and a screenplay. Never content to just do one thing, the Chicago decade also found Craig working in a variety of
church and nonprofit contexts as a youth pastor, associate pastor, arts educator, college professor and church planter. Through these experiences, Craig developed a passion for merging the arts world with social justice concerns. His next career move, which
took him to Minneapolis, found him serving as the Creative Director for a progressive congregation which utilized the arts to foster racial reconciliation, poverty awareness and neighborhood revitalization; all the while, Craig continued directing professionally.
A surprise move back home to Ohio six years ago has propelled Craig in a new direction. Now serving as the curator of Translations Art Gallery and as the Creative Director for a branding and identity agency called Cassel Bear, he gets to play with the interaction
between words and images all day. He continues telling stories on the stage, with recent directing credits of
<i>The Elephant Man, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,</i> <i>Other Desert Cities
</i>and <i>God of Carnage.</i> He also began acting again, tackling the challenge of a one-man play, Lee Blessing’s
<i>Chesapeake</i> and being very short as Lord Farquaad in <i>Shrek.</i> As ever, Craig would like to thank his family for their support of his multi-directional, oft-indecipherable life and career trajectory. And he thanks you for supporting the arts, so that
he can continue to do what he loves.</p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><b>About the Show’s Production History</b></p>
<p style="margin: 5.0px 0.0px 5.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">The original Broadway production of
<i>A Delicate Balance</i> opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City on Sept. 22, 1966. The production ran for 132 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1967. There have been two Broadway revivals: in 1996 (with Elaine Stritch playing
Claire) and in 2014 (featuring John Lithgow as Tobias and Glenn Close as Agnes). A film adaptation, released in 1973, was directed by Tony Richardson and starred Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Lee Remick, Joseph Cotten and Kate Reid. Weathervane Playhouse
first produced <i>A Delicate Balance</i> in 1968; the production was directed by Robert Belfance.</p>
<p style="margin: 5.0px 0.0px 5.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><i>(Sources of this background information: the Internet Broadway Database, the play’s afterword and Samuel French, Inc.)</i></p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><b>About the Playwright</b></p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><b>EDWARD ALBEE</b> is perhaps best known for his association with the artistic movement of the 1950s and early 1960s more popularly regarded as "the theater of the absurd." Born in Washington,
D.C., on March 12, 1928, Albee’s parents abandoned him as a baby. A wealthy couple who owned a theatre chain, Reed and Frances Albee, adopted the infant boy. The Albees named their son after his adoptive paternal grandfather, Edward Franklin Albee, a powerful
vaudeville producer who had made the family fortune as a partner in the Keith-Albee Theater Circuit.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Despite the lavish environment in which he grew up in affluent Westchester, New York, he was, by most accounts, unhappy. He attended Trinity College, a small liberal arts school in Hartford, Connecticut
for a year. After failing to show up for the school’s chapel services, as well as certain classes, Albee was dismissed by the school. At the age of 20, Albee left home and settled in Greenwich Village in New York City. He took on various jobs, including the
roles of “office boy,” record salesman, and Western Union messenger. </p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">During his early years in Manhattan, he also began to meet other writers, including Thornton Wilder and W.H. Auden. It was Wilder who suggested that he try his hand at plays. At the age of 30, Albee
wrote his first play, <i>The Zoo Story</i>, in a quick, three-week period. </p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Albee's first full-length, three-act play was
<i>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i>, and its 1962 Broadway production won the Tony Award for Best Play. Centered on fractured family relationships,
<i>Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? </i>won him international fame and opened new doors of artistic opportunities.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Albee’s other plays include
<i>The American Dream</i>, <i>Tiny Alice</i>, <i>A Delicate Balance</i> (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award)
<i>All Over</i>, <i>Seascape</i> (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), <i>The Lady From Dubuque</i>,
<i>The Man Who Had Three Arms</i>, <i>Finding the Sun</i>, <i>Three Tall Women</i> (winner of the Pulitzer Prize),
<i>Fragments</i>, <i>The Play About the Baby</i>, <i>Occupant</i> and <i>The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?</i> He is a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation,<span style="font: 11.0px Calibri">
</span>which maintains the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center (a writers and artists colony in Montauk, New York). He was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980 and in 1996 received
the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Ever the iconoclast, Albee himself once summed up his career for an interviewer by declaring, "I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing — and I plan to
go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga — it will all equal itself out. You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response."</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial">Weathervane Playhouse and its dedicated volunteers offer vital performing arts resources for the people of Northeastern Ohio. We create exciting and thought-provoking shows with impressive production
values. Through educational programs and volunteer opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds, Weathervane serves the theater community, our patrons and our volunteers.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial"><i>The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, education excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.</i></p>
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