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

... He's switching the words of an Auden poem. He substitutes the domestic "shirts" from Auden's "water" in "Thousands have lived without love but none without water"... A little later He substitutes each of the ingredients from his wife's list for Auden's "water". When He exchanges "creme brulée" for "water", he does admit: "It lacks... well, it doesn't... there's not as much resonance that way... Creme Bruleé for water, or shirts for water, for that matter, but if parody isn't a diminishment... well, then, was it worth it in the first place?". He and She deliberately parody serious ideas and words from poetry, thus showing little if any aesthetic appreciation for the material which they cite. Such are the people whom Albee consistently terms "Philistines" in his public addresses.

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9 The petal picking test veils the very visible blindspot of the play, which is the rose itself, as the common flower for both He and She. The rose is present when these two people cannot communicate and counts the ways of living. Loving and hating for them. In other words, the rose is a metonymy of the couple's living together, a metaphoric child with the help of which both can 'measure the love the other. Its petals 'count the ways' in which love and hate can be lived and interpreted. The flower, as the adopted baby in The American Dream

, is dismembered petal by petal by He, and then has to be replaced by another one. The petals 'strip out' the truth they two never mentioned or avoided answering. Since it is a symbolic construct of the unsaid desires, the rose stands for the imaginary child of the two, as the sonny boy in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? who is never to be 'mentioned' to anyone else. The rose's function (besides hiding the blindspot) is also to make She and He ridiculous and to make them subject to (reader's and audience's) laughter. The blindspot rose is made devoid of any content of sentiment because the people of the cast fear intimacy and directness. It is a structuring device, a tool with which the characters can 'measure' the parameters of their relationship. (Similar questions and variant affirmations are found the relative-play of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where the George and Martha are figuratively counting the petals of "the lion's tooth", the snapdragon). He: She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. 6

9 Ibid., 133-134. 164