Eddie and Grandma

Edward Albee's The Sandbox:

It's never a good idea to start with unrealistic ambition. 

Oh well.

I picked up The Sandbox after two-hundred and twenty-three bruisingly dysfunctional pages of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and was sure that there couldn't be the same kind of dramatic ambiguity in some little fifteen page one-act. It's practically a skit, I pish-poshed. Eddie wouldn't do that. 

 Well, Eddie would. Granted, it's not incoherent; his dedication gives away pretty much the whole thing, in fact. Mommy is appallingly mean to Grandma in her feeble old age. Grandma, wiser than Mommy and Daddy suspect, gives her charming performance of decline in a sandbox that reminds me alarmingly of the litter-box my cat sleeps in when she's angry. Done and done.

I'm afraid, though, that there's one point that keeps sticking me. I'm pretty sure that even the better informed theater-goer would not look at the cast on stage and peg the hunky guy in the short shorts as the Angel of Death. Luckily, the reader gets the memo when the character is introduced ("He [Mr. Speedo] is, after all, the Angel of Death"), and the audience is also privy to a subtle window on his character ("Young Man: Hi, I am the Angel of Death."). Not exactly Albee's usual vagueries.

But I can't keep criticizing because, you know, it's Albee. And it has a number of perfectly redeeming qualities; minus the on-stage calisthenics I enjoyed reading it a lot. Grandma is deliciously quirky, Mommy is more realistic than we'd care to admit, and hey, Mr. Speedo certainly doesn't hurt the scenery. Technically, the scene is also clear--the characters are well understood for the most part, and the dramatic action is plainly evident. 

I may get the guts to tackle one of his more major works at some point, but for now, a little sand and family cruelty are a big enough first bite.