If Albee were not so arrogant, one would view his desperate stratagems with pity. When you have failed with every kind of play, including adaptations of novels and other people's plays, the last remaining maneuver is the nonplay. Finding himself in a box, Albee has contrived two interlocking nonplays, based, apparently, on a mathematical error: it is by multiplying, not by adding, minuses that you get a plus. Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, when run together like two ink blots of different colors, raise the Rorschach test to new dramatic heights. (p. 157)

Rather than as a fugue, the exercise struck me as a piece of vocal cadavre exquis, without even the amusing trouvailles bequeathed by chance on that famous surrealist parlor game. One can perhaps extract some quasi-meanings (like teeth from a toothless mouth): the commonplaces of communism vs. the banalities of the bourgeoisie; the parallel miseries of the rich and the poor; the shibboleths of Mao's gospel vs. the silences of the man of God. But these are not so much legitimate explications as counsels of despair. In a fugue, in any case, there is development. Here, once the quartet is visually and vocally presented, there is nowhere to go. (p. 158)

We get the same ambitious, artificial, circumlocutory prose Albee keeps elaborating in his later, sterile works. It consists of false starts, emendations, indirections, apologies, and general syntactic deviousness. One guesses that Albee imagines this to be some wonderful cross between Beckett and Joyce; in fact, it is a barren, puerile mannerism. It suggests a kind of doddering pedantry that Albee might attribute to a particular character—if it were not so often out of character…. And always that pathetic intellectual climbing of the (insufficiently) self-educated: "They didn't know who Trollope was!—that is a life for you," complains the LWL, and one winces for Albee. For behind such outcries we have come to recognize the genteel author's feelings of superiority over, and especially against, the unwashed that surround him, or that he chooses to surround himself with. (pp. 158-59)

But suppose it were the character that is being ridiculed. So much the worse for play and playwright; it would mean that they are suffering from delusions of being Beckett, who alone can get away with this sort of thing by virtue of much greater sensitivity to words and to the essential foibles of human nature. (p. 159)

As for Albee, where does he go from here? He could perhaps eliminate the third dimension from his box, or have us sit in a voiceless dark. We'll get to the grass roots of theater yet, even if it means burrowing underground like a mole. (p. 160)