27 pages • 54 minutes read
The Sandbox
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The Cycle of Life and Death
Mommy and Daddy have brought Grandma to the beach in hopes of rushing her into death, preemptively holding her funeral before she manages to die. Symbolism in absurdist theater is deliberately slippery, as is demonstrated by the fact that the “beach” is represented by a child’s sandbox on a mostly bare stage. A real beach is dominated by cycles. The tides rise and recede cyclically pulled by the cycles of the moon. The life cycles of the animals from birth to reproduction to death follow predictable patterns based on these progressions and the cycle of sunrise and sunset. These natural cycles are inevitable and outside of human control, an organic clock that continues ticking relentlessly. The human life cycle of birth and death is also inevitable; Grandma experienced her life as an arc, rising to the point when her adult daughter became her caretaker and then declining. At the beginning of the play, Grandma has reached the end of the cycle, which mirrors the beginning. She cannot walk and has reverted to a preverbal state.
But the beach in the play seems to exist in a liminal, surreal space. As is typical of absurdist theater, time in the play is illogical and meaningless. The backdrop of the sky doesn’t show a progression from day to night, it snaps between light and darkness at the directions of the characters. Music keeps time until the characters call for it to stop. And no matter how long they are sitting on the beach waiting, the tide never seems to come in. Unlike the beach, a sandbox is manmade and stagnant. Within the liminal dream space of the beach, Grandma experiences a moment outside of the cycle to regain her voice and speak to an audience before peacefully accepting her death. Grandma uses the time to reminisce about the point in her life when she was the strong one, taking care of her daughter with little money and without the help of a husband. From the anonymity of being known only as “Grandma,” she asserts a small measure of immortality by sharing a piece of her story.
The cycle of life and death in the play is perpetuated in the progression of the young as they age and displace the elderly. The two women fight for control in these last moments. Mommy rushes time along by continuing the funeral ritual and Grandma tries to fool her by burying herself and playing dead. Grandma forges a connection with the Young Man, just as Albee’s grandmother had formed a close relationship with him. Filling the role of the grandchild, the Young Man is still young and blank. He sees Grandma with fresh eyes, unfraught with the conflict of family history. He treats her like a person and recognizes her as an elder with wisdom. But in the end, death comes for her suddenly with a sound like thunder or crashing waves. Grandma is surprised to realize that this kind youth is the harbinger of death. While she had been trying to stay alive to spite her daughter, Grandma lets go willingly for the Young Man, offering praise and encouragement and going peacefully into death.
Ageism and Abandonment
The experience of aging and death was virtually unexplored in theater when Albee wrote The Sandbox, particularly regarding ageism (a term used anachronistically here as it wasn’t coined until 1969) and the aging of women. In The American Dream, Grandma admonishes Daddy for speaking to her harshly, asserting that the way people speak to the elderly and treat them as less deserving of human dignity is what causes the decline of aging and eventually death. Mommy and Daddy apologize profusely at the time and speak of her lovingly. But in The Sandbox, their treatment of Grandma has devolved into abuse. This is clear from the beginning of the play, when Mommy and Daddy carry her on roughly and dump her into the sandbox. As she predicted, their poor treatment has led to Grandma’s physical and mental decline. After this point, Daddy washes his hands of Grandma’s care, reminding Mommy that she ought to make all the decisions because Grandma is her mother and not his.
In their mistreatment of Grandma, Mommy and Daddy infantilize her. No longer able to walk, Grandma is confused and terrified when she is carried in. Abandoned in a child’s sandbox with a toy pail and shovel, Grandma can only scream and shout unintelligibly. Mommy’s only acknowledgment of Grandma’s protests is to scold her like a misbehaving child. When Grandma discovers that there is an audience willing to listen to her, she finds her voice and expresses the indignity of having her agency stripped away by the daughter she had raised single-handedly. Over time, Mommy has abandoned Grandma emotionally. Grandma is still alive, but Mommy has preemptively pushed her into the grave, abandoning her fully. Mommy waits for her to die, but leaves satisfied when Grandma pretends to be dead.
Mommy and Daddy’s urge to punish Grandma for aging and then look away while she dies comments on the lack of representation onstage of aging and death, born out of a desire to avoid confronting one’s own mortality. This fear of aging and death leads to real-world neglect and abuse of the elderly. In a note before the play, Albee explains that they refer to each other as Mommy and Daddy because “these names are of empty affection and point up the pre-senility and vacuity of their characters” (33). The names “Mommy” and “Daddy” are typically used by young children to address young parents. But Mommy and Daddy are aging themselves, and there is no child present to address them. They push Grandma out of their lives because she reminds them of the specter of death. But while Mommy and Daddy manage to avert their eyes and escape watching Grandma die, the audience does not. The play simultaneously forces audiences to watch while emphasizing the cruelty of abandonment.
Performance and Anti-Realism
The Sandbox uses meta-theatricality, which are elements of a play that remind audiences that they are watching a performance. The absurdist movement was a rejection of realism because realism suggests that an objective reality exists. By undermining realism, absurdist artists were destabilizing ideas of objectivity and universal meaning. The meta-theatrical moments in the play deconstruct a sense of reality while highlighting the way people perform in their daily lives to uphold societal expectations. This effect begins with the sparse set and Mommy’s announcement that they are at the beach juxtaposed with the sandbox that is clearly not the beach. Mommy’s cruelty toward Grandma and the cold vitriol between family members are also overstated to the point of being satirical.
The funeral itself is, in a sense, a play within a play. Mommy orchestrates this performance as the customary public show of respect and grief that is expected when one’s parent dies. Mommy hires a musician to perform, adding a manufactured emotionality through sound. She chooses a spot on the beach to bury her mother. She sits in a chair and waits. But Grandma is still alive. Mommy performs the ritual and Grandma plays dead for her. Even when the funeral is over and Mommy and Daddy leave, Grandma is still not dead. Grandma has performed an imitation of death to go along with her daughter’s performance of grief. The characters are not only cognizant that they are performing in a play, but they also seem to know that their performance of a funeral is absurd and hyperbolic.
The Young Man identifies himself as an actor, which reinforces the idea that The Sandbox is a play while blurring the lines between performance and reality, calling into question whether the other characters are meant to be believed as real people (even as they perform). But even though he recognizes himself as an actor, the Young Man has no independent personhood or identity. Actor, in this case, simply means that he is a blank person. He fills the role of the Angel of Death, which also makes Grandma’s final death a performance, even though it is meant to be somehow more real than the death she fakes during her funeral. The constant layering of performance obscures the sense that there is a truth or reality underneath because in the absurd, there is no truth. Albee challenges his audience to consider the similarities between the overt artifice of a theatrical performance and the latent artifice of the performance of family roles, social rituals, and especially human compassion.
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By Edward Albee
