27 pages • 54 minutes read
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The Sandbox satirizes the concept of the American nuclear family, which became popularized through 1950s television and other media as part of the new postwar iteration of the American Dream. After World War II, the American economy was thriving, boosting materialism and consumerism. As suburbs grew around major cities, the American Dream became synonymous with having a good job, owning a home in the suburbs, and filling that home with an ideal nuclear family. As seen on TV, this nuclear family included a warm, loving housewife; a strong, masculine husband who works and supports the family; and two or three perfect children. At the foundation of this idea was capitalism, since none of these goals were possible without at least a middle-class income. Albee’s skepticism of the American family, a common theme in his plays, arises from his tense relationship with his own wealthy adoptive parents and a mother whom he felt was distant and unaffectionate.
The Sandbox depicts a failed version of the nuclear family. Albee’s critique of consumerism is primarily explored in The American Dream, but The Sandbox shows the resulting familial relationships that are an extension of materialism and consumerism. Mommy married Daddy for money as a way out of poverty, pulling her reluctant mother with her into her wealthy city life. Their names suggest the existence of a child, but no children are present or mentioned at Grandma’s funeral. In the backstory of The American Dream, Mommy and Daddy purchased an adoptive child who they punished by removing parts of his body until he eventually died. Mommy and Daddy retain the empty titles as a performance of fulfilling family roles, but their child was only a commodity to be purchased and consumed. The Young Man is the same age as their former son, and is a stand-in for the missing family member, but only Grandma, who does not buy into Mommy and Daddy’s idea of the nuclear family, interacts with him meaningfully.
The Young Man has no identity and therefore has the potential to step in and replace their absent child, but the other members of the family are all wrong for the roles that they are meant to fill. Mommy is cold and unfeeling, the opposite of the nurturing housewife and mother that she is meant to be. She abandons Grandma when she begins to have needs like a baby. Daddy isn’t a strong, masculine head of the household, but weak and childish. Both are too self-involved to take notice of the Young Man. When Grandma was raising Mommy, she fulfilled the roles of both, parents—but a single-parent household in poverty isn’t a part of the narrative of the ideal nuclear family. Still, Grandma is the only character who expresses warmth and affection to the Young Man. The play suggests that the idealized American family is only a performance that breaks down in private.
In the first line of the play, Mommy announces, “[T]his is the beach” (35). This pronouncement is reminiscent of Shakespearian plays, in which characters set the location through dialogue because each play was performed on the same stage configuration with no scenic or lighting design. But in this case, the claim is contradicted by the presence of the sandbox. A sandbox would have no place at the beach, and they’re typically placed in backyards and playgrounds as a tiny, limited simulacrum of the unlimited expanses of the beach for children to mimic the way they would play on a sandy shore. The sandbox isn’t a design choice meant to imply or represent the presence of an entire imaginary beach because the title of the play suggests that the sandbox onstage is, in fact, meant to be a sandbox. Mommy’s claim that the sandbox is the beach is her first verbal manipulation that denies the world and people around her. She tells Daddy that he is warm when he complains of the cold. She says that Grandma is dead when she isn’t. She decides that Grandma’s fake dead expression is one of happiness.
Mommy’s manipulation is part of her infantilization of Daddy and Grandma. A child believes what they are told, as does an audience when a character describes something that can’t be seen. Befitting an absurdist play, the location is abstracted and contradictory. It is simultaneously the beach and not the beach. For Grandma, the sandbox is part of the disappointment and smallness of dying. Age has made Grandma’s life shrink. At 17, she married a farmer and life had possibilities. At 30, her husband’s death combined with the responsibility of raising her daughter created limitations, but she still had the vast open spaces of her own farm. Then Mommy moves her into a townhouse in the city, a situation which Grandma describes (hyperbolically or not—it’s impossible to be sure with absurdism) as a place under the stove with an old blanket and a dish. At 86, Grandma has been ripped away from home again and left in a sandbox. Her death isn’t a transcendent journey but anticlimactic, with Mommy focusing the attention on herself.
Mommy and Daddy have shaped Grandma’s old age by infantilizing her, turning her into a helpless, vulnerable person who cannot communicate with words. Infancy is an unfortunate state in Mommy and Daddy’s household because Mommy does not nurture. Dropping her in the sandbox is the final abandonment into both infancy and death. They don’t try to help her play in the sand (as most parents would with an infant) or ease her transition into death. Grandma’s only tools are toys for children, which she tries to use unsuccessfully to bury herself and obey her daughter’s wishes. Since neither the beach nor the backyard (where one might find a sandbox) are typical locations for real burials, the sandbox is a sort of metaphysical resting place. In the end, Mommy and Daddy leave and Grandma’s death is both insignificant, with no family surrounding her, and grandiose, featuring a musician and her own personal angel.
When Mommy and Daddy take Grandma to the beach, they understand that it is time for her to die. Grandma understands that they expect her to die, and even attempts to placate them by burying herself and pretending to be dead. Grandma listens indignantly to the funeral her daughter has planned while somehow neglecting to remember that Grandma is not yet dead. Or is she? The line between life and death is not so easily defined in the play. Grandma is clearly in some sort of liminal space, a limbo that isn’t quite life but may also not be quite death (as the sandbox is both sandbox and beach). Grandma acknowledges the mechanisms of performance, addressing the audience, recognizing that the Young Man is an actor, and reminding the offstage crew to change the lights. When the funeral ends and Mommy and Daddy exit, it’s almost as if she has cheated death. But then she loses her ability to move and becomes rooted to the sandbox. Grandma is surprised when the Young Man reveals himself as the Angel of Death.
Throughout historical and biblical representations of the Angel of Death or other personifications of death, such as the Grim Reaper or Thanatos, these figures have traditionally been imposing, intimidating, or even frightening. The Young Man is cheerful and innocent, dressed most undauntingly in a bathing suit. As a stand-in for Mommy and Daddy’s absent child, the Young Man begs for attention with his ostentatious exercises and his enthusiastic waves and greetings. But Mommy and Daddy are as emotionally distant from the Young Man as they are with each other and Grandma. The Young Man has no familial identifier in his name and remains a stranger, reflecting the way Albee felt alienated from his own adoptive parents. Grandma feels similarly alienated by her daughter and son-in-law. Although their interaction is brief, Grandma and the Young Man are the only characters who see each other as human.
The Young Man’s amateurish performance as the Angel of Death points both to the meta-theatricality of Grandma’s underwhelming death scene and his childlike need for validation from a loving adult. The fact that the Young Man is an actor pokes self-referential fun at the stereotypical nature of actors to seek approval and sublimate personal needs and identity to receive it. The Studio has become his neglectful parents, sending him out to perform without bothering to give him a name. For Mommy and Daddy, Grandma has resisted giving them what they want by dying, even going so far as to fake it so they would give up. But the Young Man is kind to her. Grandma sees his need for positive attention and decides to encourage him, even though his success requires her death. Grandma dies willingly with a smile for the Young Man’s sake, and the final kiss of death is sweet and affectionate.
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By Edward Albee