Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Réka Cristian: Edward Albee's Castings

(1959), Martha, George, Honey and Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

? (1962), Agnes, Tobias, Claire, Julia, Edna and Harry in A Delicate Balance (1966), Jack and Gillian in Marriage Play (1987). Some character names are fully given and these are inserted into the title of the plays. One of them is as the real person, the AfricanAmerican singer Bessie Smith, the absent eponymous character in The, Death of Bessie Smith

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4. The other full name (also a cultural code) is that of the Chairman Mao Tse-Tung from the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Here, we have not only the full name but also the function of another eponymous character, which in the given context of the Cold War bears a strong political connotation. A solitary example in Albee's oeuvre is that of Mrs. Barker from The American Dream. She is the opposite figure of Willy Loman from Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman, a success-oriented, opportunistic icy woman of the market economy who sells the dream of the perfect child to a childless family and has a ponderous voice that makes up her name. With the exception of these above-mentioned three exceptions, the reader is channeled in the dramas of Albee from the symbolic reading of the full names towards a semiotic reading of the generalized or first names of characters. The lack of family names tends to emphasize the universal nature of the bonds between humans with their visible and less visible sides. The personal frame is contextual ized as a perfect form that occasionally harbors an empty spirit, as Foster Hirsch remarked: "Albee's response to the characters is ambivalent, recalling Tennessee Williams' divided attitude to his Adonis figures: The perfect form of the American Dream cloacks an empty spirit."

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5 The typology of the Albee dramatic character is subject to the pattern of dual relations. Martha and George, Honey and Nick, Mommy and Daddy, Jerry and Peter, Agnes and Tobias, Edna and Harry, Edmee and Fergus, Benjamin and Daniel, He and She, are all characters that play the 1 "The germ idea occurred to Albee when he was reading a record sleeve note about Bessie Smith, the colored singer whose life might have been saved if she had been admitted quickly enough to hospital after a car crash, but the nearest hospital took white patients only". In Ronald Hayman Edward Albee (London: Heinemann, 1971), 13. Foster Hirsch "Delicate Balances". In Who's Afraid of Edward Albee? (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book, 1978), 15. 141