Albee, Edward (Vol. 25) - John Simon
JOHN SIMON
In All Over, Edward Albee wrote about a man dying offstage; in The Lady From Dubuque, he writes about a woman dying more or less onstage. Otherwise, there is not much difference: All Over was the worst play about dying until Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box; The Lady From Dubuque is the worst play about dying since The Shadow Box. It is also one of the worst plays about anything, ever.
Jo is dying of cancer as her valiant husband, Sam, stands lovingly by…. [Much of the first act covers] that heavily worked-over Albee territory, the closed-circuit bitchery he steadfastly puts into the mouths of his married and unmarried couples…. What had some freshness, acerb wit, and propulsion in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is here the ultimate in witless nastiness, gratuitous offensiveness, and, above all, psychological nonsense and verbal infelicity….
[Furthermore], Albee turns cancer into a...
[The entire page is 818 words long]
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