An Evening of Albee

Miners Alley Playhouse presents An Evening of Albee, featuring two of Edward Albee’s earliest works, The American Dream and The Zoo Story. These one act plays go to the roots of Albee’s 40 years of Pulitzer Prize winning storytelling and examines the American condition at the beginning of the 1960’s.

The American Dream comically portrays the dynamic of a highly
dysfunctional yet not-so-unfamiliar family. It opens with the aging Mommy and Daddy. While Mommy quarrels over whether her hat is a shade of beige or wheat, the two must figure out if they’re going to send Grandma off with the “van man” to a retirement home. Figuring out what to do with Grandma is the essential force of this play, but this time Grandma has her own agenda. When her version of the American dream comes along, she is finally able to give Mommy and Daddy what they want.

In The Zoo Story, Peter is an upper middle-class, middle-aged man,
enjoying a quiet day in Central Park. Jerry, who seems a typical bum, intrudes on Jerry’s solitude with his desire to talk about the things he has on his mind; about having “been to the Zoo,” about the death of his parents, about the squalid rooming house in which he lives. This play proceeds from this unplanned encounter between these two men in a park on an emotional journey through introspection, anger and revelation. It was this relatively short one-act that first made Albee famous as a playwright, and years
later, is still powerful and provocative.