Of course, the allegorical interpretation offered here errs in straight jacketing and rendering abstract a play that is delightfully baffling in its wacky rendering of daily life in America. But the allegorical perception is important not only because it gets at the heart of Albee’s intentions in the play but also because it enables us to relate The American Dream to his other work and to understand his larger corpus better.
With its allegorical dimension, The American Dream (1960) anticipates the heavily allegorical Tiny Alice (1964) of a few years later. More important, The American Dream constitutes an early miniature of Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962). By Albee’s own admission, of course, the main characters in Virginia Woolf were named after George and Martha Washington and Nikita Khruschev,24 which allows the allegorical affirmation that the American Dream of democratic humanism (George = George Washington) will prevail over its recent threat, scientific materialism (Nick = Nikita Khruschev).
The plays, of course, are more than allegories of the American Dream. But they are at least that, and we might look at Albee’s corpus again, expecting to find these essentials–allegorical core and obsession with the American Dream–throughout his work.
NOTES
1. The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City), p. 227.
2. “Albee’s The American Dream and the Existential Vacuum,” South Central Bulletin, 26 (1966), p. 28.
3. “Albee and the Absurd: The American Dream and The Zoo Story” in American Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 10, ed. John R. Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1967), p. 190.
4. Edward Albee, “Which Theatre is the Absurd One?” in American Playwrights on Drama, ed. Horst Frenz (New York, 1965), p. 170.
5. Way, p. 189.
6. Ibid., p. 207.
7. Four Plays (New York, 1958), p. 37.
8. “Albee’s The American Dream,” Explicator, 30 (1972), Item 44.
9. Canaday, pp. 31-33.
10. “Albee’s Targets,” Satire Newsletter, 6:2 (1969), p. 48.
11. “Illusion and Betrayal; Edward Albee’s Theatre,” Studies, 59 (1971), pp. 53-67.
12. “Hope Deferred–The New American Drama,” Literary Review, 8 (1963), p. 13.
13. Edward Albee (New York, 1973), pp. 35-36.
14. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955).
15. Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York, 1963), p. 85. All quotations from the play come from this edition.
16. An Outline History of American Drama (Totowa, N.J., 1965), pp. 66-75.
17. Meserve, p. 73, quoting Joe Jefferson’s Autobiography.
18. Grandma’s boxes have received little helpful comment. They represent a coffin in Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 11; they are “the emptiness around which we wrap our illusions” in Anne Paolucci, From Tension