End-Life Crisis in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and The American Dream
End-Life Crisis in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and The American Dream

Summary/Abstract: The essay focuses on the end-life crisis in two plays by Edward Albee, The Sandbox (1960) and The American Dream (1961) and investigates the contexts of this crisis through the figure of Grandma and her means of encountering age and death. I will use age studies and the close reading of the two dramas in order to see the ways in which Albee’s senior citizens challenge mainstream constructions of aging by reconnecting with their pasts in various ways on their deathbeds. They build up an idiosyncratic “age autobiography” (to use Margaret Morgenroth Gullette’s term) in an inventory of events and feelings by assessing a complete(d) life. By doing so they achieve an “agewise” (Gulette) identity that comes full circle in the very moment of grace.

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