At times creating bits of parallel with Beckett, the playlet is a remarkably efficient tease at much of what is to follow in the Albee oeuvre. Grandma's flirtation with the fourth wall persists here. Another young man (Jesse Williams), posing in a speedo while awaiting his big break, turns out to be her angel of death. Hiring a cellist (Daniel Shevlin) - more for diversion, one suspects, than gravitas - Grandma is deposited in a sandbox (perhaps at the beach, but more likely in the back yard, maybe with a view of Long Island Sound) to await her end. In The Sandbox, she has arranged a different send-off. Mommy spends much of The American Dream conjuring the arrival of 'the van' to take Grandma away. It is Grandma, not all that surprisingly, who orchestrates what happens next, and so pleased is she by what she has done, she can't resist stepping out of the play, to watch it end with the audience. Albee's assault is not complete, however, until a young man (Harmon Walsh), who is denominated The American Dream, arrives. Barker (Kathleen Butler), the adoption agency-running 'club lady' who brokered Mommy and Daddy's adoption of their 'bumble of joy' until they blithely disposed of 'it' in a manner befitting a Greek tragedy. The American Dream begins as a tame enough satire only to explode into a full-scale onslaught on the prevailing sensibilities. Up to this point, Europe had had its Theatre of the Absurd, but Albee was the first to engage it in an American context. Some were bowled over by the then-young (now-octagenarian) playwright - his Zoo Story was still running at the time - but some critics were so offended by The America Dream that they wouldn't even review it. His focus was set on something broader - what we can best appreciate today as the worldview promulgated by 'The Donna Reed Show,' 'Ozzie and Harriet,' and their 1950's 'peachy-keen' kin. But Albee didn't write these plays merely as an exercise in parent-trashing.

The hideously overbearing, materialistic and wicked mother, and the weak father who long ago resigned his own self to her, are Albee's adoptive parents the sharp-tongued grandma who suffers not-in-silence under her daughter's domestic tyranny is his maternal grandmother Cotter, who died in 1959, and to whom The Sandbox is dedicated.

fiction, the family trio arrives in these Albee plays almost directly from his real life. The three major characters - Mommy (Judith Ivey), Daddy (George Bartenieff) and Grandma (Lois Markle) - appear in both.Īlthough the two plays are, as set out above, much about reality vs. The latter is not a sequel, though it is clear it could be. Kathleen Butler, Judith Ivey, Harmon Walsh and George BartenieffĪlbee was writing the considerably longer American Dream (it runs about 75 minutes here) in 1959 when he stopped long enough to write The Sandbox, which clocks in at just over a quarter hour.

Edward albee the sandbox