An Early Play by Edward Albee

Author(s): James E. White

Source: American Literature , Mar., 1970, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar., 1970), pp. 98-99
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2924387

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 Notes 99

hints and gleams of what is to come. Tiny Alice years later, as

Mr. Debusscher surmised, was to take up many similar themes:
the tenuousness of religious faith, the difficulty of one's cleaving
to a benevolent God in a seemingly malevolent world, institutional
hypocrisy, and blind dogmatism; but the treatment was to be con-
siderably superior in philosophical and psychological depth, and
the satiric technique was to be quite devastating. The grandmother
of Schism, narrowly dogmatic but likable and sympathetic, surely
prefigures the grandmother of The Sandbox and The American
Dream, although the latter character, still extremely sympathetic
as a person, was to appear largely free of institutional connections
and was to be flippant and sophisticated in commenting on the
unfeeling world about her.
If Schism faintly foreshadows some of the thematic concern of
the later playwright, and if it hardly proclaims the coming mastery
of technique, it may still serve the thoroughgoing Albee scholar as
a measure against which to chart the author's artistic development
It may otherwise rest in peace-as best it can.

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