5/16/2023 0 Comments The sandbox seattleThe play addresses issues of ageing and dignity, the cyclical nature of life, and the inevitability of dying. Albee was cut off from his grandmother when he became estranged from his parents, due to his desire to become a writer, and did not learn of her death until after her funeral. However, Albee had a close relationship with his maternal grandmother, and as its subtitle suggests, The Sandbox was inspired by her death. Albee was adopted as an infant and expressed a sense of disconnection from his wealthy parents, a theme he explored in many of his plays. The Sandbox challenges the notion of the nuclear family, which was increasingly idealized in the 1950s in tandem with the concept of the American Dream. While European absurdism began as a response to the devastation of World War II, American absurdism was primarily a response to the rising materialism and conspicuous consumption of the postwar economic boom, and the intrusion of commercialism in theater. Absurdist playwrights capture this concept by defying traditional structures of theater and life absurdist plays feature very little action or illogical action, characters are unstable, inconsistent, and alienated from another, language is insufficient for communication, the passage of time is nonsensical or unpredictable, and questions are left unanswered.Įdward Albee was the first significant American playwright to take up absurdism with his 1959 one-act The Zoo Story. The word “absurd” refers to actions or events that are not dictated by the rules of logic and reason. In his seminal essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus asserted that the absurd occurs when the innate human desire to search for meaning in life clashes with the inherent meaningless of an illogical world. The term Theatre of the Absurd was coined in 1961 by theater critic Martin Esslin, who identified several playwrights who had been writing work inspired by French philosopher Albert Camus, such as Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet.
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