It was four years after Virginia Woolf opened on Broadway that A Delicate Balance premiered in New York and won the Pulitzer Prize. The play explores “the emotional savagery of suburbia and the psychological terror of empty lives”. The Boston Record American wrote:
[It] strikes a balance between wisdom and folly, fact and fancy, truth and its consequences. As simple as a child’s fable, as complex as life itself, and although the story it tells is profoundly serious, it is often gustily funny. 30 years later, Albee rewrote only two lines in the original script of A Delicate Balance for its 1996 Lincoln Center revival. It handily won the Tony Award for Best Play Revival.  In Albee’s view:

"The play does not seem to have “dated”; rather, its points seem clearer now to more people than they were in its lovely first production……..The play concerns- as it always has, in spite of early on critical misunderstanding- the rigidity and ultimate paralysis which afflicts those who settle in too easily,  waking up one day to discover that all the choices they have avoided no longer give them any freedom of choice, and that what choices they do have left are beside the point."

The critics clearly loved the play’s revival:
    Theatrical Fireworks…….…You may think you know the work of Edward Albee, but the chances are that you don’t…..                  
Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Enormously satisfying. We have been starved for Edward Albee’s spectacularly verbal characters, for idealized, horrible, and fascinating grown-ups who talk in paragraphs, not to mention witty, entertaining and disturbing arias.                   
Linda Winer, Newsday

Other reviewers  described  A Delicate Balance  as “elegant theater”….”classy and cool”……”theater the way it should be” …… and ”nirvana for theater lovers”.

Jeremy Gerard of Variety called it :
Exquisite! It amply demonstrates there are plenty of laughs to be found at the edge of the abyss.

Albee’s career took a slight downturn after the success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, at least in reference to audience appeal and critical approval. It wasn’t until the production of A Delicate Balance that Albee would again enjoy popular, critical, and financial success. Although A Delicate Balance won Albee his first Pulitzer Prize, most critics at the time considered the play, as Steven Drukman writes in American Theatre, to be one of Albee’s ‘‘last gasps.’’ Although it would not be Albee’s last gasp, Albee would have to wait almost ten years before he would win his second Pulitzer (for Seascape [1975]) and then again almost another twenty years before he would again claim the prize for his Three Tall Women (1994).

Despite his erratic successes, Albee has had an extremely significant impact on American theater. His play A Delicate Balance has often been credited with creating an archetype for American drama with its classic study of the American family, albeit a quite dysfunctional one. The play looks into the confusion that erupts in a modern family’s attempt to avoid pain and discomfort, which, as Albee demonstrates, only creates more pain and discomfort. The play’s major themes are denial of emotions (and often reality itself), loss of opportunities and potential, and regret over paths not taken as re- flected in the lives of a very well-to-do suburban couple who have retired but find their long-sought freedom about to collapse. In the period of one weekend, their home comes under attack by emotionally wounded family members and friends, who, in the end, expose the couple’s own emotional insecurities. The scenes are not easy for audiences to take, but, as Albee states in an interview with Richard Farr in The Progressive:

"If I wrote plays about everyone getting along terribly well, I don’t think anyone would want to see them. . . . You have to show people things that aren’t working well . . . in the hope that people will make them work better."