Entertainment and Artifice Theme Analysis

Edward Albee’s The American Dream is part of a movement called “Theatre of the Absurd”—plays written in the decades following the end of World War II which used heightened reality, absurdism, and breaking of the “fourth wall” between the stage and the audience to highlight the irrationality of society, entertainment, and the intersection of the two. The world, absurdist playwrights knew, was plunged into a strange and dangerous new era in the wake of the war’s violence and its ushering in of the nuclear age; how, they wondered, could entertainment possibly ignore the surreality and absurdism of the present moment? As an answer to this question, Edward Albee—and other artists of the absurd—constructed dramas that deliberately called out their own artifice. Through The American Dream, Albee argues that there is no value in art or entertainment that hides behind itself and refuses to acknowledge the societal and existential problems plaguing the outside world.

Absurdist theatre uses ludicrous situations, larger-than-life characters, and opaque, mysterious plots to create a complicated experience for its audience. In doing so, absurdism shines a light not just on the absurdity of society, but also on how ridiculous it is to turn to entertainment as a source of escapism. Through The American Dream, Albee engages with all the major tenets of absurdist theatre—and, through the use of direct address, particularly in the play’s final moments, makes a biting commentary about audiences’ unwillingness to forgo a night of entertainment in order to think about real social issues. As the play draws to a close, Grandma has seemingly been carted away from the apartment—to Mommy and Daddy’s relief and delight—while The Young Man, the handsome and well-mannered “American Dream,” has come to stay. Mommy and Daddy are rid of Grandma, who acted as their historical awareness and societal consciousness, and have instead someone—or something—that allows them to think only of the bright vision of the future ahead of them. Just when Mommy mentions that The Young Man seems familiar, Grandma, who has been hiding at the front of the stage and watching the last several minutes of the action unfold, steps forward and speaks directly to the audience. She tells them it’s time for the play to “wrap […] up”—it’s supposed to be a comedy, after all, and to push things further might send the play into darker territory that no one wants to see.

Though the play has already confronted the death of the American dream, the collapse of the nuclear family, the effects of cruelty and indifference, and has also featured graphic depictions of poverty, starvation, physical mutilation, and emotional trauma to boot, Grandma insists it’s still a “comedy” that mustn’t be pushed any further into darkness. Trauma and cruelty, Albee’s saying, are so woven into the fabric of everyday American life that most Americans are willing to accept them as part of a “comedy.” Pointing out that the horrors the audience has just witnessed are barely scratching the surface is Albee’s way of condemning Americans for how much misery and horror they’re willing to overlook, and his way of chiding them for trying to seek refuge in entertainment. Grandma tells the audience it’s important to end the play at a moment in which “everybody’s got what he thinks he wants.” The characters may or may not be about to discover the truth of what’s happening to them; Mommy and Daddy seem to have a kind of amnesia about what they did to their adopted “bumble” years ago, but the play suggests that being reunited with that bumble’s twin, The Young Man, may stir them from their complacency. By having Grandma cut the action off before this point is reached, Albee is further condemning his audience: he’s suggesting that they don’t really want to watch these traumatized characters solve their problems. People want to watch a “comedy,” even if it’s a dark one—they don’t want to see arbiters of cruelty be held accountable for their actions, because if audiences did want that, they wouldn’t be trying to escape reality through theatre in the first place.

Albee uses The American Dream, a piece of theatre in the absurdist tradition, to point out the lunacy not just of contemporary American society and the indifference it shows to the major problems, but also the ridiculousness of using entertainment as a way to escape these dark truths. Through the play, Albee argues that entertainment as escapism has no value. Art’s responsibility, he’s saying, can and should be to throw the problems of society into relief and force people to reckon with them, rather than to let them or even encourage them to ignore the truth of the world around them.