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

supplementing game. They are all centripetal characters directed towards a lost primordial unity

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6. The dramas of Albee seek to reveal and subvert in a powerful battle of words all maladjustment that destroy the harmony between and among the members of the family (as a basic social unit) and outside it. "The image of the family as a cauldron of seething Freudian maladjustment haunts Albee in all of his work; in different moods and styles, he returns, obsessively, to these destroyed and destroying figures."

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7 observed Foster Hirsch. In the act of repeating the description of the destroyed and destroying figures (as part of the family rituals), the dramatic plots of Albee's plays are mostly loose frameworks against which the playwright sets "his characters snapping at each other"

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8. This "snapping" is here a form of communication, of communion between and among the characters. The "snapping" as a form of communication induces a dualism, which depicts the Albee vision of fundamental human attitudes: love and hate. These attitudes will finally form a unit in establishing the meaning of the telling in Albee's plays, which (as confessed in the Mel Gussow book by the playwright himself) are the reinterpretation and the reevaluation of the mystery of his birth and the sense of (his afterwards) abandonment. If the playwright's (personal) journey in life is a singular one, as Mel Gussow defines it, the journey of his mimetic characters tend to attain a sense of plenitude, a desire for the primordial, semiotic phase in a dual construct. They live in interdependence. Ail follow the urge to 1

6 The most perfect form is the primordial semiotic communication/communion with the mother, which stands at the base of all later human communications and relational abilities. The angular desire engulfed by the corpus of the infant and the body of the mother becomes a semiotic realm of the unsaid, which later develops into forms of telling. The object-relation theory seems to explain the process. The infant develops a primary identification with the first object of love, with the mother, after the period of un-differentiation before birth. The process of differentiation shifts from the feeling of the total symbiosis, as depicted by Margaret Mahler, in the fusion of the mother-child diad. to separation, as the traumatic process, to individuation (through primary and secondary identification processes, the Oedipal stage and the Lacanian mirror stage), and finally, to the stage of the autonomous the subject. " Foster Hirsch "The Living Room Wars". In Who's Afraid of Edward Albee

? (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book, 1978), 21. 1

8 Ibid., 24. 142