In the 1959 Sandbox - written prior to 1960's American Dream but now serving as its inevitable coda - Mommy and Daddy have changed out of Carrie Robbins' red-white-and-blue duds into mourning-black for an outing on the beach. That supposedly dead boy could be their last visitor, a strapping lad identified only as Young Man (Harmon Walsh). Barker (Kathleen Butler), who may be the woman who 20 years before arranged their adoption of a son. Almost instantly, they're interrupted by Mrs. In The American Dream, Mommy (Judith Ivey) conducts a mostly one-sided conversation with Daddy (George Bartenieff) on Neil Patel's ironically patriotic red-white-and-blue set until crotchety, plain-speaking Grandma (Lois Markle) joins them. That they now possess a patina of nostalgia is less significant than the importance they take on as introducing Albee's abiding theme: the stultifying American family. But though they've lost a sizable chunk of their shock value, these one-acts still offer their own rewards especially as directed by the hardly mellower octogenarian playwright himself - at the same theatre where The American Dream fist bowed.
Since they first jolted audiences into sitting up and taking notice, they've influenced too many subsequent plays, just as they were influenced by the Absurdist playwrights preceding them in the late 40's and 50's. Watching Edward Albee's dark comedies The American Dream and The Sandbox, now at the Cherry Lane Theatre, can't be the same today as coming up against them when they were written almost 50 years ago.
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