The legacy of Edward Albee's play The American Dream is an interesting glimpse of American theater reflecting American life. It is one of Albee's early works and was first staged in New York at the York Playhouse on January 24, 1961.

Noted as being one of the theaters founding playwrights of what is called "The Theater of the Absurd", his work almost always evokes strong public response and divided critical acclaim.

This play takes place in one act and is considered a satire on the "the American Family", of the post war era where progressive modernization was changing the American way of life-the American Dream -the American Family.

It is a story about a married couple and their grandmother, who one day are visited by 2 guests who disrupt their mundane life. In Albee's own words in the preface to the play he states:

"[It is] an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Who could say it better than Albee, ever the theaters caustic cynic, whose theatrical slices of American life bring raw brutal reality to entertainment and make us think for a moment.

THE LEGACY

Critics and historians all agree that Albee's, The American Dream began the Theater of the Absurd movement in America. European play writes such as Genet, Pinter, Becket and Ionesco took theater into the Existential world after World War II. These plays did not rely on keeping conventional theatrical devices of character, plot, action and setting in reality. The new' theater favored deliberately skewed and totally unrealistic ways to view life and people. Albee especially enjoyed examining the modern American dilemma with its, alienation, despair, male and female paradigm shift, insanity and other themes society really didn't not want to talk about.

This one act play attacked the "American dream" and shattered the lie of the perfect ideal American family, that Madison Avenue was pitching in ads for
every new product the American Family supposed needed'. It cut holes into the cold war era illusion of family and aided the cries of the 1960's generation or young idealists, who saw the world through a more critical eye.

The play was received with mixed reviews. Though the public seemed to like the jolt of absurd reality it presented, some critics

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