The Sandbox (play)

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Data
Title: The sandbox
Original title: The sandbox
Original language: English
Author: Edward Albee
Publishing year: 1959
Premiere: May 16, 1960
Place of premiere: Jazz Gallery in New York City
Place and time of the action: Beach in the USA in the 20th century
people
  • Mommy (Mommy)
  • Daddy (daddy)
  • Grandma (grandma)
  • The Young Man
  • The Musician

The Sandbox (German: Der Sandkasten , 1966) is a one-act play by the American playwright Edward Albee , written in 1959 , which was originally written for the Two Worlds Festival in Spoleto (Italy) and was performed there for the first time in June 1959. The American premiere took place on May 16, 1960 at the Jazz Gallery in New York under the direction of Lawrence Arrick. In German-speaking countries, The Sandpit was premiered in May 1966 in the Büchner Theater in Munich under the direction of Alfred Gulden; a version in the broadcast by Pinkas Braun was first performed on December 20, 1966 in the Bremerhaven City Theater.

The short 15-minute Dramolett that Albee himself called a "short distance" and the memory of his maternal grandmother was dedicated, was a prelude to the planned one-act play The American Dream (dt. The American dream designed). In The Sandbox , Grandma dies the actual stage death at the end of the play, after having previously faked her death to Mommy and Daddy. The nameless young man she meets in the game ultimately turns out to be an angel of death who has come to get her.

Content and plot

The scene instructions provide for a largely empty stage for the performance of this one-act play, on which there are only a minimum of props : two simple chairs, a large children's sandpit with a neat heap of sand ("slightly elevated and raked") , a toy bucket and a shovel. The sky forming the background changes in the course of the piece from brightest day to deepest night (“from brightest day to deepest night”) .

At the beginning of the play the young man is alone on the stage. He looks good (“good-looking”) and is “well-built” . Only wearing swimming trunks, he does continuous calisthenics (“does calisthenics ”) until the end , only moving his arms. According to the stage direction, his arm movements should suggest the beating and flattering of wings .

The dialogue begins with the appearance of Mommy and Daddy : “So, here we are. This is the beach ” (“ Well, here we are: this is the beach ”) . Mommy is a “55-year-old, well-dressed imposing woman” (“55, a well-dressed imposing woman”) , while Daddy in Albee's notes as a “60-year-old, short, gray, thin man” (“60, a small man; gray, thin ”) . Right from the start, Mommy teased her husband like a toddler, reprimanding him and forcing him to listen to her own babble. Daddy obeys her obediently; behind his humble demeanor, however, lies resignation .

Mommy waves to the young man; then she calls the musician (according to Albee's role specification only described as “of no particular age, but young would be nice” , p. 1) from the background, who begins to play an unspecified piece. After a short exit , Mommy and Daddy carry Grandma, Mammi's mother, onto the stage, an "86-year-old, tiny, wrinkled or shriveled woman with bright eyes" ("86, a tiny, wizened woman with bright eyes") . According to the stage directions, Grandma holds her hands “rigidly under her armpits ”, her feet are “pulled up and do not touch the ground” (“borne in by her hands under her armpits… quite rigid; her legs are drawn up; her feet do not touch the ground ") . Her facial expression shows "confusion and fear" ("the expression on her ancient face is that of puzzlement and fear") . The couple let Grandma plop into the sandpit rather roughly ("more or less dump her in") and make an admittedly futile attempt to start a conversation with each other. As Mommy tells her husband, he can talk to her if he can think of something new. However, since Daddy has nothing to say, Mommy enjoys her power over him and laughs triumphantly (“a triumphant laugh”) .

In the meantime, Grandma squeaks incessantly like a small child and hits the sandpit with the shovel. After Mammi asked the musician to stop playing, Grandma suddenly threw a shovel of sand at her daughter, which promptly reprimanded her mother.

For the grandmother, apart from a few memories, there is nothing left that connects her with her daughter; she therefore addresses the audience directly (“speaks directly to the audience”) in order to gain understanding for her situation: “Be honest. Is that a way to treat an old woman ? ” (“ Honestly! What a way to treat an old woman ”) .

The grandmother then reveals some essential details of her life story to the audience: After the early death of her husband, whom she married at 17 and who died when she was thirty, she raised her daughter on her farm alone. She disparagingly reports about her daughter that she subsequently married her husband only because of his wealth. Later, her daughter and her husband brought her from the farm to the big town house, assigned her "a nice place under the stove" ("they moved me into the big town house with them ... fixed a nice place for me under the stove") ) and given her an " army blanket " and her "own bowl" ("gave me an army blanket and my own dish ... my very own dish") . However, since there is nothing to complain about , she also does not want to complain ("So, what have I got to complain about? Nothing, of course! I'm not complaining") .

While she reveals autobiographical information to the audience , she also has a brief conversation with the musician. When Grandma finally asks if it shouldn't get dark, the lights on the stage go out. It is middle of the night ( "deepest night") and the musician accepts unsolicited his game back on. However , according to Albee's instructions, the figures on the stage are illuminated with a spotlight ("spotlights on all the players") , including the young man who continues his gymnastic exercises all the time.

When Mummy hears a thunderstorm in the background of the stage, she turns to her husband in a whisper, barely able to speak: "You know exactly what that means". ... "It means that Grandma's time is up" ("and you know what that means. ... [barely able to speak] ... It means the time has come for poor Grandma") .

A huge thunder can be heard in the background and all lights on the stage go out except for the spotlight on the young man. Although grandmother also knows that her time is up, she first declares that she is not ready for it (“I'm not quite ready”) and continues to shovel in sand. Then however - half covered in sand - according to the director's instructions, she takes on the role she was supposed to play and fakes her death (“Grandma plays dead”) .

The stage is illuminated again like daylight. Mommy and Daddy console themselves with the fact that the supposedly dead woman looks "so happy" ("It's ... it's hard to be sad ... she looks ... so happy") and shortly afterwards they leave the scene. In the end, Mommy tells the musician that he can now finish his game and go swimming instead.

At the same time, the young man remembers that he still has one more sentence to say at this point ("I ... I have a line here") . Like a dilettante , he then recites his address to his grandmother: “I am the angel of death. I ... um ... I came to get you ” (“ I am the Angel of Death. I am… uh… I am come for you ”) .

He bends over the old woman, kisses her forehead and brings a smile to her face. Only now does the grandmother die her own death on stage. As she dies, she returns the young man's thanks, who has now placed his hands on hers. The musician starts playing again and the curtain falls.

Interpretative approach

As a prelude to the one-act play The American Dream, which was written a year later, Albee's mini-drama introduces its central characters. The couple remains nameless; The mere role designation as mommy and daddy expresses that for the two of them a marriage without parenthood is presumably inconceivable; Their namelessness, however, points to the emptiness and “jaded senility” of their characters; the mutual affection of the two is only artificial or meaningless and meaningless. According to Grandmother's statements, Mommy married her husband just for the money; she is the dominant person in the relationship and does not take her husband seriously by treating him like a toddler and teasing him accordingly.

The triviality or banality of the exchange of words between the married couple, increased to the grotesque , also reflects the superficiality of their feelings. The more realistic or also the more drastic the scene, the more farcical the reactions from Mommy and Daddy become. The absurdity of the dialogue is also evident in the reversal of family relationships, when Mommie, like a child, commands her mother sharply to stop pelting her with sand immediately.

In the final scene of the one-act play, on the other hand, a “touch of poetry ” can be felt in the old woman's turn to the young man who embodies the angel of death. The mutual affection of the two is sincere; paradoxically, the game ends shortly before the grandmother's death with a romantic love scene, as it were , in which the young man and grandmother admit their tender feelings for one another a little helplessly.

The poetry hinted at in this way in the final scene is at the same time in sharp contrast to the married couple who only feign parental love. As in the two previous one-act acts by Albee, death as “the great maker of consciousness” determines the end of this piece. Mommy and Daddy are just talking dolls or mockups of themselves; Moreover, in the end no person is left behind who could become aware of himself. With this, Albee is addressing the audience that is addressed several times in the play in a confidential tone. According to his intention , the viewers themselves have to take on the task of a "changing figure finding self-confidence".

Furthermore, this one-act play expresses Albee's socially and time-critical attitude, which exposes the factual events in contemporary [American] society as absurdity: the old, like Grandma, are deported as soon as they are no longer able to perform; whoever is apparently no longer “strong” should no longer stay alive.

Origin and Effect

During college and the subsequent eleven years of searching for his own literary and artistic path, Albee initially devoted himself more to poetry and prose than to drama . However, his poems and drafts of novels did not satisfy him as an author. When Thornton Wilder gave him the friendly and fatherly advice to try writing plays, Albee turned to writing and designing stage works after this conversation with Wilder, initially in the form of several one-act plays or short plays.

In the drama The Sandbox as well as in the related one-act play The American Dream, he took over essential dramaturgical effects that Wilder had not invented in his plays, but vividly demonstrated: in particular the mixing of game and reality as well as direct addressing to the audience in order to get as close as possible to reality through such a technique of disillusionment.

Obviously Albee used Wilder's dramaturgy only as a stimulus for experimentation; while Grandma in The Sandbox is still clearly “out of character” in the literal sense, Albee reduced this technique to a minimum in The American Dream a year later ; here Grandma's contact with the audience is more like speaking aside .

At the American premiere in May 1960, the New York Jazz Gallery did not follow the author's suggestion that the piece should only be staged as a prelude to The American Dream . Even with the American premiere of The American Dream , the York Playhouse in New York did not adhere to Albee's specifications; Albee's original plan was only implemented in the subsequent productions in the USA.

After its premiere in May 1960, the piece was initially received mostly critically in various reviews in the New York press and mostly panned because it was both " nihilistic " and " immoral " ("nihilistic and immoral") . An angry critic also announced that he refused to review Albee's next work at all.

Albee himself spoke of The Sandbox as his “favorite play” . The Sandbox is a "perfect play" and "a damn good play" ("a perfect play ... a damn good play") ; Self-deprecatingly , he added that this work was fortunately too short for him to have made any mistakes in it (“Fortunately it's short enough so that I can't make any mistakes in it”) . Likewise, Albee emphasized in an interview in the Paris Review in the fall of 1966 that he particularly liked The Sandbox . It is an absolutely beautiful, gorgeous and perfect piece ( "I'm terribly fond of The Sandbox. I think it's an absolutely beautiful, lovely, perfect play." ).

The German premiere at the Büchner Theater in Munich in May 1966 received little attention and was criticized in a review of the Süddeutsche Zeitung as a amateurish production; Albee's one-act play, which shows a “nightmarishly frustrated Amerikatum”, has become “a happy gymnastics fun” in the German premiere.

In Germany the piece then led a shadowy existence for a long time, but was performed several times by American amateur ensembles, especially in American houses .

Secondary literature

  • Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, pp. 60–63.
  • Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , pp. 20-29.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, pp. 10, 61, 63 and 121. For the American premiere, see also Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , pp. XII and 20. In the Signet book edition of the piece, in deviation from the information given by Braem and Hayman, the date of the American premiere is April 15, 1960. For the performance of the German version by Pinkas Braun, cf. Edward Franklin Albee - works, plays . On: coacheese.de
  2. ↑ Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, pp. 61 and 62 f.
  3. ↑ See also Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 61, and Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , p. 20.
  4. ↑ See also Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 61 f.
  5. ↑ See also Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 61 f.
  6. ↑ See also Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 62.
  7. ↑ Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 61. See also Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , p. 20.
  8. ↑ Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 62.
  9. ↑ Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 62. See also Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , p. 23.
  10. ↑ Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 63. See also Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , p. 20.
  11. ↑ On this influence, see Wilders in detail Helmut M. Braem: Der Sandkasten . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 60 f.
  12. ↑ See Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 121 f.
  13. ↑ See Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , p. 22.
  14. ↑ Quoted from Ronald Hayman: The Sandbox and The American Dream . In: Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights - Edward Albee . Heinemann Verlag, London 1971, ISBN 0-435-18409-1 , p. 20.
  15. ↑ Edward Albee: The Art of Theater No. 4, Interviewed by William Flanagan . In: Paris Review , No. 39, 1966.
  16. ↑ Quoted from Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 121 f.
  17. ↑ See Helmut M. Braem: The sandpit . In: Helmut M. Braem: Edward Albee , Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater, Volume 63, Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1968, without ISBN, p. 121.