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 women Albee reserves his sharpest satiric jobs are the ones who unravel, like the Nurse and Mommy, the hysterics who want everyone to collapse along with them. Women rule the roost in Albee's households; sometimes they govern wisely if icily, sometimes their power is clearly threatening and emasculating. It is significant, though, that women are typically presented as maternal rather than romantic figures

2

1. As in virtually each of Albee's works, "sex is handled evasively, kept at distance from the play's ostensible focus of dramatic interest""". What is important is not the real or perceived gender of the characters, it is rather the relational image they project through the texts they tell or act. Albee's dramatic text is a palimpsest consisting of the readings of all the characters involved (as many subplots as many characters). What they read is their own selves projected into the other, or at least, the desire to see themselves in the other. Albee is "a modern spirit building from the inside out"*" and has an implied artistic danger that Eugene O'Neill described as 'beyond theater'. His Pirandellian maschere nude, the stripped semblance of what is commonly called "character", relies on the power of recognizing a Wittgenstein-type difficulty in human communication. This difficulty becomes materialized in Albee's "almost perverse refusal to trim it down to direct and acceptable statement"

2

4. Eloquent examples in this manner are the marking figures of Grandma from the American Dream and Sandbox, of Claire from A Delicate Balance, Jerry from The Zoo Story or the famous Martha-George couple from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. These are some of the wise Shakespearean Prosperos clothed in burlesque modernist dramatic situations and talks. Humor, in Albee's dramas, becomes a trap for the reader; in his dramas "to laugh at any of these things is to laugh at our Foster Hirsch "Evasions of Sex: The Closet Dramas". In Who's Afraid of Edward Albee

? (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book, 1978), 106. 2

2 Ibid., I 12. 2

3 Anne Paolucci "The Discipline of Arrogance". In From Tension to Tonic. The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 5. 2

4 Anne Paolucci "The Existential Burden. The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, The Zoo Story". In From Tension to Tonic. The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 18. 144