"The American Dream," directed by Edward Albee at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Photo: Gabe Evans.

The American Dream and The Sandbox by Edward Albee. Directed by the author. Original music by William Flanagan. Set design: Neil Patel. Sound design: Arielle Edwards. Light design: Nicole Pearce. Costume design: Carrie Robbins. With Judith Ivey (Mommy), George Bartenieff (Daddy), Lois Markle (Grandma), Kathleen Butler (Mrs. Barker), Harmon Walsh (Young Man, The American Dream), Daniel Shevlin (The Musician) and Jesse Williams (Young Man, The Sandbox). Running time: 90 minutes, with one intermission. At the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street. Reviewed at the 29 March matinee performance. Runs 21 March-19 April 2008.

Edward Albee’s 1961 play The American Dream put him on Martin Esslin’s map of the Absurdists. And it does recall the nonsensical doings of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano easily: the seemingly inane dialogue and stylised behavior of a husband and wife waiting for visitors are loopy comedy of the highest order. But there’s a slashing viciousness here too, an economic/political awareness, not to mention the seeds of much of Albee’s later work. Albee’s own production of the play, along with its sort-of companion piece The Sandbox (though written before The American Dream, it’s here presented on the second half of the bill) at the Cherry Lane Theatre, is a reminder that American surrealism wasn’t always so whimsical, as the current saying goes: here it cuts deep, reminding one of Swift’s injunction that one should use the point of one’s quill, and not the feather.

Both plays had productions at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the 1960s, so it’s kind of a homecoming for Albee. Childless Mommy and Daddy, in a large apartment and saddled with a tetchy Grandma, are waiting for a Mrs. Barker for some undetermined reason as the play begins; the reason remains undetermined even when Mrs. Barker finally arrives. It’s Grandma who finally reveals Mommy and Daddy’s dark secret to Mrs. Barker: that Mrs. Barker was responsible for arranging a catastrophic adoption, and that Mommy and Daddy are selfishly seeking “satisfaction.” They get it in the form of a Young Man who wanders rather aimlessly into the apartment; he is the American Dream, Grandma decides, and she engineers both a cruel joke on Mommy and Daddy and her own escape from their clutches.

That’s the plot, but Albee doesn’t lecture; he explores, and among the issues he uproariously upends are parenthood, the treatment of the elderly, materialism, professional do-gooding. Clearly too, the themes that will haunt his later plays are all here: sexual and reproductive barrenness and the irrationality of sexual desire (not to mention the Puritanical disgust with sex itself – Mommy refers to sex with Daddy as a process of “bumping [his] uglies”), the illusions that keep marriages together, the emptiness at the heart of contemporary American life and even the metaphysics of twins. They’re picked up and juggled, twisted in the light and let fall again, and none of the questions he raises about American life are answered. Well, that’s not quite true; answers to mysterious questions are what drive narrative along, after all; but, as with the Absurdists, the answers to all these questions are provisional. The Young Man, an actor from Hollywood, warns, “Be careful; be very careful. What I have told you may not be true. In my profession …” In these provisional answers Albee gives leave to the audience for imaginative freedom; once led into a dark corner through comedy, it’s up to the audience to find its way out again.

The Sandbox, written shortly after the death of Albee’s grandmother, is a 13-minute comic elegy featuring many of the same characters of The American Dream, but unlike The American Dream it replaces the illusion of life with the reality of death. There’s a Young Man here too; however, he’s no longer the “American Dream,” but, as he says, “the Angel of Death” (and in this production played by a different actor than the Young Man in the first play). The piece enacts the final moments in Grandma’s life as Mommy and Daddy follow social conventions that accompany family death, and they leave as lightly as they arrive, but only Grandma has finally found peace at the curtain.

Albee’s own production is simple and vaudevillian. The brightly-lit set and costume colors of The American Dream are swathed almost exclusively in hues of red, white and blue; he takes the play at a breakneck pace, and draws burlesque performances from his actors, with Judith Ivey as a sharp-edged but craven Mommy and George Bartenieff as a feminised, infantilised Daddy, who spends most of the plays bouncing his useless fists up and down on his knees like a toddler in a high-chair. Lois Markle is incisive, mordantly cynical and bitter as Grandma as she demonstrates a more realistic perspective on the absurdities around her than any of the other characters, who also include Kathleen Butler as the blithely inane Mrs. Barker, Harmon Walsh and Jesse Williams as the beautiful but empty young men, and Daniel Shevlin in a small but amusing role as the musician in The Sandbox, performing William Flanagan’s original, tender score for the play.

The plays do date somewhat, showing their era. There are iceboxes instead of refrigerators in the dialogue; and it’s been some time since Women’s Clubs have been common, let alone women have regularly worn hats (it’s Carrie and her gang drinking Cosmopolitans at dance clubs now). But Albee’s plays here demonstrate the same careening, contemporary energy that animates his most recent work. They also demonstrate that the themes that haunt an artist from the beginning to the end of his career rarely change; the drill deepens, but in taking on the darker questions of American life, you’ll never hit rock bottom.