The American Dream, one-act drama by Edward Albee, published in 1959 (with The Zoo Story) and first produced in 1961. This brief absurdist drama established the playwright as an astute, acerbic critic of American values. The American Dream addresses issues of childlessness and adoption. The play’s central figures, Mommy and Daddy, represent banal American life. Clubwoman Mrs. Barker visits, and Grandma reminds her of an earlier visit, when she brought an infant. This child did not turn out as Mommy and Daddy expected and so was abused by them until it died. When a handsome but emotionless young man -the American Dream- later arrives, Grandma suggests that Mommy and Daddy adopt him, since his emptiness seems to be what they desire.
Author
Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize. People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream . He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice—as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era. Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."
