Mommy and Daddy sit in a barren living room making small talk. Mommy, the domineering wife, is grappling with the thought of putting Grandma in a nursing home. Daddy, the long-suffering husband, could not care less. Grandma appears, lugging boxes of belongings, which she stacks by the door. Mommy and Daddy can’t imagine what’s in those boxes, but Grandma is well aware of Mommy’s possible intentions. Mrs. Barker, the chairman of the women’s club, arrives, not knowing why she is there. Is she there to take Grandma away? Apparently not. It all becomes evident when Grandma reveals to Mrs. Barker the story of the botched adoption of a “bumble of joy” twenty years ago by Mommy and Daddy. Mrs. Barker appears to have figured it out when Young Man enters. He’s muscular, well-spoken, the answer to Mommy and Daddy’s prayers: The American Dream.

In the preface to one publication of The American Dream, Albee explains the content of the play:

The play is an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, 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.

Is the play offensive? I certainly hope so; it was my intention to offend – as well as amuse and entertain. Is it nihilist, immoral, defeatist? Well, to that let me answer that The American Dream is a picture of our time – as I see it, of course. Every honest work is a personal, private yowl, a statement of one individual’s pleasure or pain; but I hope that The American Dream is something more than that. I hope that it transcends the personal and the private, and has something to do with the anguish of us all.

Albee, Edward. Preface. The American Dream and The Zoo Story. New York: Penguin, 1997. 53-54.

Type: Short Play

Acts: One

First Performance: 24 January 1961, York Playhouse, New York

Awards: Best Plays of the 1960-1961 Season, Foreign Press Association, 1961. Lola D’Annunzio Award, 1961.

Plot Summary and Critical Analysis by Celine Rafferty

Plot Summary

In their living room, Mommy and Daddy are seated in armchairs waiting for their houseguest, who is late. While waiting, Mommy tells Daddy about her hat shopping excursion from the prior day, quizzing him to ensure he is paying attention throughout her story. At the store she decided on a “lovely little beige hat” [1]; however, Mommy runs into the chair of her women’s club once outside. As she tells it, the chairwoman convinced her the hat was actually “wheat-colored” [2], and feeling slighted, Mommy marched back to the hat shop to demand they exchange the wheat-colored hat for a beige one. The clerk brings her an identical hat, again calling it beige. Mommy gladly accepts the “new” hat, aware of and unbothered by the trick to appease her because she “got satisfaction” [3].

Grandma — Mommy’s mother — enters the stage carrying “neatly wrapped and tied” boxes [4]. She won’t tell Mommy or Daddy what’s inside them, and in turn, Daddy mocks how long the elderly woman spends in the bathroom, though he later apologizes earnestly. Once Grandma leaves to retrieve more boxes, Mommy admits how she hates when Grandma does house chores and wishes to send her to a nursing home. Daddy protests, saying he provides for both of them very well. Mommy relishes in her entitlement to his wealth, saying: “I have the right to live off you because I married you, and because I used to let you get on top of me and bump your uglies; and I have the right to your money when you die” [5].

Grandma re-enters with the last of the boxes, dropping them at Daddy’s feet. He tries to flatter her, but she doesn’t buy it, calling both of them oblivious to the everyday realities of being old — a point she makes throughout the play. Again, Daddy is apologetic, but Mommy has no sympathy. Vindictively, Grandma reminds Mommy of how “Daddy doesn’t want to get fresh with [her] anymore” [6]. They go back to waiting for their guest, with Mommy warning Grandma not to say a word when they arrive. Finally, the doorbell rings. Grandma asks if it’s “the van people” [7] come to take her away to a nursing home but Daddy assures her it isn’t. Daddy then grows nervous about letting their visitor in. To get him to open the door, Mommy exaggerates his decisive, firm, and masculine qualities [8]. Mrs. Barker enters and realizes she has been to the apartment before, but does not remember when. Mommy soon realizes Mrs. Barker is the same chairwoman from the previous day, as she is wearing the same hat Mommy bought, though Mrs. Barker now claims hers is not beige or wheat, but cream-colored.

Mommy and Grandma get into yet another fight about the boxes; upset with her mother, Mommy orders Daddy to “go right into Grandma’s room and take her television and shake all the tubes loose” [9]. They bicker before Daddy reluctantly leaves to do so. Mommy then exits the stage herself to get Mrs. Barker a glass of water. Now alone with Grandma, Mrs. Barker again insists she doesn’t know why she has come to the apartment. Grandma tells her that twenty years prior, Mommy and Daddy adopted a baby because they couldn’t conceive; Mrs. Barker volunteers for the adoption agency they used. Mommy and Daddy abused the baby — referred to only as the “bumble of joy” — due to its sexual maturation and curiosity: they gouged out its eyes; mutilated its genitalia; and severed its hands and tongue all before “it finally up and died” [10].

Later, the doorbell rings, and Grandma — now alone on stage — answers it. A handsome Young Man, who Grandma initially thinks is the van man, is at the door. They hit it off immediately, with Grandma even confiding in him that she entered a baking contest under a pseudonym to win the $25,000 cash prize. They also discuss the Young Man’s conventional and familiar good looks until Grandma deems him “the American Dream” [11]. The Young Man says he has come to the apartment looking for work, saying he will do “almost anything for money” [12] to which Grandma informs him Mommy and Daddy might have a job for him. The Young Man explains he and his twin brother were separated as children after being orphaned when their mother died. As he grew up, he experienced emotional pains mirroring the physical ones suffered by the bumble of joy. Grandma realizes he is the twin of Mommy and Daddy’s bumble but does not tell him this, only that he has been hired.

Before she can explain the job, however, Mrs. Barker comes in, and Grandma instructs the Young Man to follow her lead. Grandma introduces him to Mrs. Barker as the van man coming to collect her and her things; at this the Young Man leaves to take the boxes outside. While he is gone, Grandma whispers in Mrs. Barker’s ear how she can solve Mommy and Daddy’s problem, which the audience now understands is being childless. Mrs. Barker eagerly agrees to Grandma’s suggestion, bids her goodbye, and runs off to tell Mommy and Daddy the news. Grandma is alone again for a moment before the Young Man returns from leaving the boxes outside. She finally reveals the contents as “the things one accumulates” throughout life [13], each of which has been referenced previously in the play. The Young Man tenderly walks Grandma out before Mommy, Daddy, and Mrs. Barker return. Mommy begins to cry upon realizing Grandma has left, but Mrs. Barker then reveals the Young Man and introduces him to Mommy and Daddy. They decide to have a drink to toast their satisfaction with the Young Man. As Mommy cozies up to the Young Man, Grandma reenters the stage, but unseen by the characters. Instead, she addresses the audience, reminds them that the play is “a comedy” and that it would be best to end the play in this moment as “everybody’s happy [and] everybody’s got what he thinks he wants” [14].

Critical Analysis

Since its debut off Broadway in 1961, The American Dream has become one of Albee’s most popular plays, widely produced and anthologized. Upon its opening, however, there was much debate as to whether the work had value. In his New York Times review of the initial production, Howard Taubman admits the play “has its share of amusing and penetrating surprises,” but that the dialogue “comes perilously close to being the gibberish it is mocking” [15]. Geri Trotta’s Horizon review, however, is filled with nothing but praise for Dream: Albee “is a master at using trivial dialogue . . . to achieve a scathing penetration of character” [16]. She also describes the play as “a comedy of laughter that flays the skin and chills the bone” in order to unmask “the monstrous in our ordinary selves” [16].

The monsters of Dream, Mommy and Daddy, have provoked much discussion among Albee scholars. In order to understand what makes the couple such bad parents, the relationship between the two must first be explored. Even for first-time viewers, it is clear they do not have a loving, equal relationship. Emeline Jouve likens them to children playing house; and when they assume their roles, they are “reduced to signifiers of the traditional concepts of femininity and masculinity, but they are deprived of the stuff that women and men are made of” [17]. Daddy is the clearer example of this deprivation, as his emasculation is put on full display. Having undergone an operation in which “the doctors took out something that was there and put in something that wasn’t there” [18], Daddy has received “a new feminine identity” and is thus barred from running the household [19] and having intimacy with Mommy. Matthew Roudané describes “their physical separateness [as] simply emblematic of their spiritual aridity, which . . . Albee saw as a ubiquitous condition of American culture” [20]. Mommy is perfectly fine with this arrangement, as she has the control she craves. She isn’t maternal, empathetic, or nurturing, and she doesn’t want to be. As CWE Bigsby notes, “the villain of the piece is obviously Mommy” [21] and this aligns with Anne Paolucci’s overview of the matriarch. She is the governing force of the apartment, and she governs knowing “it’s all an act. In the void which is her life, Mommy gets satisfaction by insisting on her way.” She needs the trivial self-indulgence from being heard and told she was right [22]. Philip C. Kolin calls her cruel and paternalistic [23], and Michael E. Rutenberg echoes the sentiment by labeling her rule over the apartment a dictatorship [24]. The reader can infer that Mrs. Barker behaves the same way in her own home, as seen in her egging Mommy on outside the store and what we know about Mr. Barker. He is “an absolutely adorable husband who sits in a wheelchair all the time” [25] and thus physically reliant on Mrs. Barker in the same way Daddy is emotionally reliant on Mommy.

Of course the driving motivation behind this control and perversion is money. Roudané explains the couple strives for “monetary satisfaction, [as] a goal attainable because of their belief in the myth of the American Dream” [26]. This is seen in Mommy’s entitlement to Daddy’s money and how she fussed about her hat at the store, but also in the bumble’s dismemberment. Kolin likens the mutilations to a sacrifice meant to “[appease] the false gods of American consumerism” as each act takes away a form of personal connection: sight, intimacy, touch, and speech [27]. Mommy and Daddy discard parts of their bumble as if he were an accessory going out of style; the treatment of their son as property is reinforced by Mrs. Barker — an extension of commercialism — as she not only “sold” them the bumble, but comes to provide a replacement product.

The new product in question, the Young Man, is the center of much of the scholarly discussion of Dream, and rightfully so; interpretations, however, are divided on how to view the pseudo-prodigal son. While Paolucci asserts that “[the play’s meaning] is constantly suggested in the figure of the Young Man, who is perhaps the closest approximation to what may be called the ultimate statement of reality” [28], the reader must reflect on what said reality is. As Grandma astutely points out, he is the American Dream: “a handsome face, toned muscles, and “a breath of fresh air” [29]. By Dream’s end Grandma and the Young Man are kindred spirits, but few scholars share her enthusiasm at the American Dream’s personification. Roudané says his “spineless” integration into the family “forces the audience to reassess what [Mommy and Daddy] might nurture” [30]. Jouve posits the Young Man has “re-membered” the familial unit and “[restored] the traditional gender roles defined by the traditional conceptions of family,” but he ultimately “is an empty signifier” [31]. Gilbert Debusscher concurs that “inside [the Young Man’s] handsome shell there is nothing but a void” and since being separated from his twin, he has “experienced a progressive mutilation of his spirit and deadening of his flesh” [32]. He “no longer [has] the capacity to feel anything,” and can only offer his physical body [33]. The troubling reality is that the Young Man fits perfectly into the typical American home: “he is an actor, the perfectly pliable man . . . because he is drained of all substance and individuality” [34]. The Young Man is all but defined by his lack of free will and instinct and by his desire to conform, predicting a grim, gray, and utilitarian future for America’s youth.

In contrast, Grandma “is a bastion of individuality in the face of encroaching uniformity” [35], according to Debusscher. Throughout Dream Grandma is constantly calling attention to the disregard we show those who do not strengthen society’s consumerism. She does not spend like Mommy and she does not earn like Daddy. True, she wins the $25,000 from the baking contest, but she does so in secret and doesn’t spend the money on anything. According to Bigsby, Grandma “[demonstrates] the possibility of dissent from a society that resolutely ignores reality in its passionate concern with appearance” [36]. At the play’s end she does just this. She exits the stage — out of the “nightmare” in which people are identified by their function [36] — and steps into the real world, our world. While it is possible to view Grandma’s departure as her death, as in Dream’s companion piece The Sandbox, Albee further explains that it “is really a departure ‘from a form of life that is a great deal more dead than anything else’” [37].

That pessimism is exemplified by Albee’s dialogue, as Debusscher asserts his “form pitilessly [ridicules] the worn-out metaphors of our daily language” [38]. Martin Esslin says that Albee’s language in Dream “resembles that of Ionesco in its masterly combination of clichés” and regards the drama as “Albee’s promising and brilliant first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd” [39]. Dubbed as such by Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd is a literary movement in which its qualifying works embody Absurdist ideals such as existentialism, lack of a linear plot, and the dismantling of language. Throughout Dream there are several moments in which the latter is seen: Mommy citing a “day old cake” expression that doesn’t exist; Mrs. Barker complimenting “what an unattractive apartment” rather than an attractive one; and Mommy asking Mrs. Barker to “take off [her] dress” instead of her coat [40]. Debusscher, Jouve, Kolin, Paolucci, and Roudané all consider Dream and its aspects absurdist, but Rutenberg asserts it is a mistake to connect Albee with this movement because Albee’s “interest is in reflecting the inequalities and hypocrisies of man-made ills” rather than exploring Fate, which is a common thread through absurdist works. [41]. A question then arises: how else could one categorize Albee and thus Dream? Lincoln Konkle proposes Albee and his works be viewed as examples of postmodernism, another literary movement that challenges norms via self-reflexivity, skepticism toward metanarratives, and parody to name a few. According to Konkle, “all postmodern works investigate their own artificiality or constructedness” [42]. This is seen in the final moments of Dream when Grandma reenters the stage, addresses the audience, and reminds them that the play “for better or worse, … is a comedy” [43]. At her departure, the audience can delight in knowing Grandma is no longer part of the oppressive and rigid family in Dream. By representing the individual in a society that prioritizes unanimity, Grandma is an Other: something that “postmodernism incorporates without denigrating and more often [celebrates]” [44].

The American Dream was published and performed the year prior to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the connection between the two is clear: both reflect on the American family, examine marital dynamics, and satirize societal expectations. While Who’s Afraid is considered Albee’s magnum opus, one should not dismiss his preceding one-acts. Paolucci regards Albee’s use of language as his greatest contribution to the American stage [45], and in the seventy performance minutes of The American Dream, Albee has used it to condemn America’s obsession with consumption, status, and domination, all at the expense of human decency.

Footnotes

[1] Albee 153.
[2] Albee 154.
[3] Albee 102.
[4] Albee 157.
[5] Albee 106.
[6] Albee 108.
[7] Albee 168.
[8] Albee 170.
[9] Albee 187.
[10] Albee 198-200.
[11] Albee 208.
[12] Albee 209.
[13] Albee 143.
[14] Albee 148.
[15] Taubman 28.
[16] Trotta 44.
[17] Jouve 19.
[18] Albee 117.
[19] Kolin 29.
[20] Roudané 51-52.
[21] Bigsby 33.
[22] Paolucci 28.
[23] Kolin 29.
[24] Rutenberg 68.
[25] Albee 101.
[26] Roudané 51.
[27] Kolin 31.
[28] Paolucci 29.
[29] Albee 133.
[30] Roudané 54.
[31] Jouve 23; 24.
[32] Debusscher 37.
[33] Albee 139.
[34] Roudané 54.
[35] Debusscher 38.
[36] Bigsby 33.
[37] Albee qtd. in Rutenberg 76.
[38] Debusscher 38.
[39] Esslin 226-7.
[40] Albee 105; 113; 114.
[41] Rutenberg 62-3.
[42] Konkle 125.
[43] Albee 248.
[44] Konkle 113.
[45] Paolucci 15.

Works Cited

Albee, Edward. The American Dream, The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, 2007, pp. 95-148.

Bigsby, CWE. Albee. Oliver and Boyd, 1969.

Debusscher, Gilbert. Edward Albee. Tradition and Renewal. American Studies Center, 1967.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Doubleday, 1961.

Jouve, Emeline. “Dismembering/Remembering: Dramatizing the Family in The American Dream.” Sex, Gender, and Sexualities in Edward Albee’s Plays, edited by John M. Clum and Cormac O’Brien. Brill, 2018, pp. 15-27.

Kolin, Philip C. “Albee’s Early One-Act Plays.” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, edited by Stephen Bottoms. Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 16-38.

Konkle, Lincoln. “The Label, or How We Should Classify Edward Albee?: Some Notes toward a Definition of Albee as Postmodern.” Edward Albee and Absurdism, edited by Michael Y. Bennett. Brill, 2017, pp. 111-25.

Paolucci, Anne. From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee. Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.

Roudané, Matthew. Edward Albee: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Rutenberg, Michael E. Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest. DBS Publications Inc, 1969.

Taubman, Howard. “The Theatre: Albee’s The American Dream: His Play on Bill With Bartleby, an Opera Jane Hoffman Heads Cast at the York.” New York Times, Jan 25, 1961, pp. 28.

Trotta, Geri. “Review of The American Dream.” Critical Essays on Edward Albee, edited by Philip C Kolin and J Madison Davis. GK Hall & Co, 1986, p. 44.