OVERVIEW

“The Sandbox” is a 15-minute one act play by Edward Albee that premiered in 1960. A
companion piece to Albee’s “The American Dream,” the short playlet uses some of the
same characters in an absurdist premise of Mommy and Daddy bringing Grandma to the
beach in order to bury her in a sandbox and wait for her to die. “The Sandbox” considers
some of the same themes that would undergird(support) Albee’s later masterpiece, “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” satirically commenting on the hypocrisy and emptiness of middle-
class American life.

The stage is set up as a beach in broad daylight. The play opens with a muscular young
man doing mostly arm-based exercises near a sandbox on the beach. In the stage
directions, Albee specifies that his movements should look like wings flapping.

A middle-aged couple, Mommy and Daddy, enter and begin to complain about the
weather. The young man greets them in a friendly way. As they try to figure out where to
put grandma, a musician comes out on stage and Mommy directs him to start playing.

Mommy and Daddy drag Grandma on stage by dragging her under her elbows. She is
resistant and acts like a petulant (rude) child. Deciding that the sandbox is a secure place,
Mommy and Daddy position her in the sand and set up chairs facing her, only to have
Grandma throw some of the sand in Mommy’s face. In annoyed and dismissive tones,
Mommy and Daddy coldly discuss how burdensome it is to take care of Grandma.

Suddenly, Grandma sheds her childish persona, tells the musician to stop playing, and
chats with the young man. When she asks him his name, the young man shrugs – the
movie studio where he is an actor hasn’t given him one yet.

Grandma then speaks directly to the audience. She has no idea why her daughter has
brought her to live in the city. After all, Grandma has spent her whole life on a farm where
she got married at 17, was widowed at 30, and managed to raise Mommy and run the farm
by herself. Now that Mommy has married the rich Daddy, they’ve brought Grandma to live
with them in the big city, where they’ve given her space under the stove, an army blanket,
and her own plate.

The musician is again told to start playing and suddenly the lights dim to indicate that it is
night time. A loud rumble is heard off-stage – something that Mommy and Daddy
acknowledge not as thunder or some other in-world sound, but as a noise produced off-
stage during the play that they are in. Nevertheless, they take the music, darkness, and
noise to mean that it’s Grandma’s time to die. Mommy pretends to be deeply grief-stricken
while Daddy compliments her on how bravely she is holding up.

Even though Grandma is still talking to them – mocking their emoting and pointing out
that she refuses to die without her own say-so – Mommy and Daddy quickly wrap up their
mourning, talk about the importance of moving on, and leave.

Grandma realizes that she can no longer move. At this point, the young man kisses her
forehead and interrupts her chit chat to tell her that he has an important line to say
because he is actually the Angel of Death. In a wooden monotone he says, “I am come for
you.” Grandma warmly and reassuringly compliments him on his delivery and then smiles
and closes her eyes. The musician begins to play again and the play ends.

Albee dedicated this play to his maternal grandmother, and consistently claimed to
consider it his best work. It has been staged many times, usually together with “The
American Dream,” with reviewers consistently preferring the biting humor of the short
playlet to the longer main play. Critics single out for praise Albee’s acerbic (sarcastic) view
of the unempathetic and often greedy way in which we await a supposedly loved one’s
death – although perhaps this attitude is one of self-preservation rather than complete
disregard.

Reviewing the 2008 off-Broadway revival of “The Sandbox,” Ben Brantley wrote in The
New York Times, that this play “remains a harrowingly (painful) effective chamber piece”
while Joe Dziemianowicz warned in The New York Daily News that Albee’s version of “the
storybook family deliver swift comic kicks and a piercing sting.”

Th e S an d b ox Th em es
The Sandbox, one-act play by Edward Albee, published in 1959 (with The Death of Bessie
Smith) and produced in 1960. It is a trenchant satire on false values and the lack of love
and empathy in the American family. For his expanded one-act play The American
Dream (1961), Albee used the characters he created for The Sandbox—Mommy, Daddy, and
Grandma— as well as some of the play’s dramatic material.
D eath
Death is the central theme of the play as the play itself is a theatricalization
of Grandma's death. While the events onstage do not reflect traditional
images or markers of death, certain elements, such as the Musician, and the
fact that the Young Man is presented as the "Angel of Death," suggest that
we are watching a version of Grandma's funeral. We never see Grandma
actually die, but various stage antics(jest/act), such as her piling sand on
herself, and her not being able to move, represent her passage from life to
death.
B ad M arriag e
Daddy is described by Albee as a small man, grey and thin. During the
play Mommy asks his opinion of things, but he never has a strong one, opting
to do whatever Mommy wants to do. Mommy and Daddy bicker (engage in
petty quarrel) and rarely see eye-to-eye, but they uphold the image of their
marriage for the sake of appearances.
In d ig n ity
Grandma explains how she married a farmer at 17 and he died when she was 30.
Mommy is their child, whom Grandma raised alone. When Mommy married Daddy,
she came into a lot of money and took Grandma off her farm to live in their
townhouse in the city. As Grandma describes it, however, they put her under the
stove, giving her only an army blanket and a dish. Albee shows that Grandma is a
woman who has been through a great deal of hardship, yet is only given the bare
essentials and no respect. We see this clearly as well from the fact that Mommy and
Daddy bring Grandma to the beach to die, a place she does not care to be. Even the
way they carry her out by her armpits and plop her in a sandbox to wait for her to
die represents their lack of respect for her.