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

sung as the rhymes of the 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush'). They exclaim: "WE... GOT FRIGHTENED!... We... got... scared... We... were... terrified... AND THERE WAS NOTHING!"

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4. What seems to be the no-named thing, the "nothing" for Edna and Harry, is the pain of Teddy's lack for Agnes and Tobias. Both couples love and hate at the same time. This culminates in Tobias's soliloquy about the always shifting nature of love: "we love each other, don't we?"; in his statement about liking Harry and disliking Edna at the same time, or in Harry's questioning the friendship of Tobias: "Do they love us?" The answer is always an ambiguous one since love entails hate and hate entails love. The love-hate relationship is visible even from the horizon of the context of Agnes and Tobias: a dead male child, a failed daughter, an alcoholic sister and an (almost) broken marriage. All try to hold together the love and the hate (error, fright, plague) which, as the unsaid and unnamed "terror" of Edna and Harry, inhabits the house and requires a delicate human balancing act to keep safe the equilibrium between and among the characters. The rhetorical question of "love and error" lurks from all the deeds within and outside the couple(s) and implies a similitude between the characters in coping with these (similar to the "kindness" and "cruelty" of Jerry and Peter in The Zoo Story). The book Agnes reads in the drama shows the similitude of humans (at the level of sexes) in the balancing act(s) their relationships imply. This book stresses the fact that "sexes are reversing, or coming to resemble each other too much, at any rate"

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:" and as such, another balancing act is uttered in terms of gender. The phrase from Agnes' book is similar to George's when he talks with Nick about the genes in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf! George states "people are rearranging my genes, so that everyone will be like everyone else."

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6 Edna utters a similar sentence when she realizes that the balancing act made the lives of all characters similar: "Our lives are the same" while Agnes realizes that they "become allegorical" in their substitutive relations with each other. 4

4 Edward Albee A Delicate Balance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 38-39. 4- Ibid., 45. 4(

1 Edward Albee Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965), 29. 154