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
the mother and father. They were, as the playwright remembers, like "two ends against the middle"" . Grandma uses the Uncle Henry nom de boulangére with which she wins the baking contest and earns enough money to depart on her own from the American Dream home. In terms of the dramatic structure she represents the figure, which indirectly induces epiphany in the play by recognizing the counterpart, the 'othered' half of the absent-present child. Her recognition of the epiphanic body as a substitution for the enigma of the play is uttered in a threefold repetition of the phrase "you look familiar". The newcomer van man, bitterly and melancholically answers to the threefold recognition in terms of the Platonic doxa: "I am incomplete, and I must therefore... compensate" 5 9. This doxa promises an end that secures economic fulfillment for the American Dream couple (Mommy and Daddy) and for The Young Man, who has became in the meantime the American Dream boy. For Albee, human relationships are always more important than conventions and social categories. The American Dream is an incursion into the human processes that occur between members of a family when the institution of marriage and the commercialism become more important than its participants. Here, the rhetoric of love and hate turns into the rhetoric of having or not having, that is possession or loss. The Marriage Play is about the pros and cons of a possible divorce, a delicate balancing act of the two characters of the play, Gillian and Jack, the married couple. Gillian is a woman "in her early 50s" and Jack is a man "in his middle 50s". The play focuses on their George and Martha type of intellectual exchange. The discussion is at the expense of the seemingly liberating idea of divorce on the part of Jack. The verbal games the couple plays is symbolic of the emotional emptiness of their marriage. Gillian's exit way from boredom is her diary, Jack's is his repetitive 'threat' with divorce. Martha and George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? start and end their game with the rhyming device of a nursery rhyme. The Marriage Play begins the ^ Mel Gussow Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. A Biography (London: Oberon, 1999), 33. Edward Albee The American Dream. In New American Drama (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1966), 53. 159
