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Abstract
Through discussion of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The American Dream, The Sandbox, A Delicate Balance, and The Goat, this essay explores ways in which the sons in Albee’s plays, many dead before the play begins, are martyrs to the home and society in which they were reared, to an unworkable gender order, and to distorted versions of the family romance. The sons are often gay, which one or both of the parents despise.
Abstract
This essay focuses on the relationship between Edward Albee’s work and that of gay playwright Nicky Silver, whose career began in 1989. While many gay playwrights during the AIDS epidemic were focusing on plays about urban gay men and the formation of intentional families and gay communities, Silver’s work, like Albee’s, centers on dysfunctional American nuclear families. Unlike Albee, with whom he is often compared, Nicky Silver is a playwright whose work usually contains central gay characters, albeit unhappy ones, and gay themes. After an introductory section on Albee’s attitude toward gay drama, the essay is devoted to comparisons of Silver’s work, particularly his plays Pterodactyls, The Lyons, and Beautiful Child, with Albee’s work. While direct influence is not always provable, there are strong similarities between the work of the two playwrights.
Abstract
Through discussion of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The American Dream, The Sandbox, A Delicate Balance, and The Goat, this essay explores ways in which the sons in Albee’s plays, many dead before the play begins, are martyrs to the home and society in which they were reared, to an unworkable gender order, and to distorted versions of the family romance. The sons are often gay, which one or both of the parents despise.
The essays in this volume focus on gender, sexualities, and sex in Edward Albee’s plays. By sex we mean not the male/female biological binary but the act of and the politics of sex. The majority of essays collected in this volume focus on some aspect of gender politics in Albee’s plays, the conflict between men and women that is enacted in the domestic spaces that serve as the playwright’s favored setting.
The essays in this volume focus on gender, sexualities, and sex in Edward Albee’s plays. By sex we mean not the male/female biological binary but the act of and the politics of sex. The majority of essays collected in this volume focus on some aspect of gender politics in Albee’s plays, the conflict between men and women that is enacted in the domestic spaces that serve as the playwright’s favored setting.