Allegory in Edward Albee's THE AMERICAN DREAM Our understanding of Edward Albee's achievement in The American Dream (1960) has come a long way since 1961 when Martin Esslin hailed it as a "brilliant first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd"1 and 1966 when Nicholas Canaday, Jr. labeled it America's "best example of what has come to be known as `the theatre of the absurd.'"2 The shrewdest assessment of absurdism in Albee is …
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…Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York, 1963), p. 85. All quotations from the play come from this edition. 16. An Outline History of American Drama (Totowa, N.J., 1965), pp. 66-75. 17. Meserve, p. 73, quoting Joe Jefferson's Autobiography. 18. Grandma's boxes have received little helpful comment. They represent a coffin in Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 11; they are "the emptiness around which we wrap our illusions" in Anne Paolucci, From Tension