Edward Albee Background [b. March 12, 1928]

From Philip Kolin’s “Albee’s Early One Act Plays…” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. Stephen Bottoms, ed. Cambridge UP, 2005: 16-36.

  • Held a job delivering Western Union telegrams all over New York City for two years before writing Zoo Story [1959-1960]. When Dutchman was first performed [1964] it was paired with Zoo Story.
  • Kolin argues that Jerry can be read through Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, the Beats in general and sees Jerry as a character who “takes aim at a homogenized America, where progress insulates thought, separating people from one another” (19). Do you agree, or is he just pressing because of the synchronic juxtaposition of Albee and the Beats? [Permanent transient?]
  • Kolin characterizes Peter as the “ upper-middle-class drone,” whose lifestyle evokes mainstream values in Eisenhower’s 1950s (20). Does his apparently unexamined life link him to the reader of Time Magazine in Ginsberg’s “America”?
  • How does the trope of confinement, cages, boxes function in the play? Laughably small rooms, bars at the Zoo, the hallway in his apartment building, parakeets in a cage, etc…
  • How does the story of Jerry and the dog [a meta-play performed for Peter] function in the play? As a parallel to Jerry and Peter? A foreshadowing? Kindness and cruelty?
  • Albee claimed, in a 1984 interview, “that Peter will not be able to be the same person again” (24).

The American Dream [1959-1960]—Premiered 1961 and ran for 360 performances off Broadway.

  • Albee’s Grandmother Cotter died in 1959 and The Sandbox was dedicated to her, whom he felt was, like himself, a victim of his domineering adoptive mother, Francis Loring Cotter Albee. She and Reed Albee of the Keith Albee vaudeville circuit adopted him and raised him in an upper-class Larchmont environment, which he resented (26).
  • Caused him to be compared to Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. Albee agreed that his play was an homage to Ionesco, but rejected the idea of imitation (27).
  • Albee said the play is “an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values…a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is ‘peachy-keen’” (27-28).
  • Kolin links the play to satirization of familiar 1950s sitcoms like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, Ozzie and Harriet, etc…because they were the leading promoters of conspicuous consumerism of everything from detergent to family values (28-29).
  • “Clichés, advertising slogans, the dead language of consumerism,” according to Kolin signal the play’s attack on a “dysfunctional society” and move Albee beyond the “devaluation of language” associated with Theater of the Absurd and toward a “performative destructive” use of language through malapropisms, among other devices [“bumble of joy”]: 30.
  • The twins evidence a further critique of consumer ideology through the idea of “getting one’s money’s worth” in an adoption. The title character, The American Dream twin, is vacuous but attractive, useless but visually appealing, a counterpart to his dead, mutilated twin brother, from whom he was separated at birth (31-320.