If it should prove to be the case that I like Edward Albee's new play, "The Lady from Dubuque,"… less well than other people do, one reason may be that the play is of a sort that I find particularly unsympathetic. Mr. Albee's intentions and my prejudices confront each other with an immediacy that has, if nothing else, the virtue of appropriateness, for in Albee's oeuvre a confrontation, usually within the bonds of a formally affectionate relationship, soon leads to collision, out of which a pinch of painful truth is expected to emerge. In the present instance, the truth I think I see emerging can be stated as a dictum: Plays that begin in a naturalistic vein risk losing credibility and the interest of their audiences if at the halfway mark they suddenly introduce characters who turn out to be personifications of states of mind or conditions of existence …, not unlike Sloth and Gluttony in some medieval morality play. I resent the insertion into a play about real people—about people, that is, whom we have been invited to pay attention to because they share with us the burden of being human—of creatures who pretend, for reasons that they may or may not consent to reveal, to be of our species but who are, we gradually perceive, embodiments of Death, or Life-in-Death, or one of a hundred other tiresome hand-me-down literary abstractions. Death is the harshest fact we know, not to be mitigated for us by the presence of superior Others from Out There; my intelligence, as well as my good nature, is taken advantage of when death is depicted as a creaky knight in armor, or a nice old man in a tree, or (who knows?) a lady from Dubuque who is neither a lady nor from Dubuque. (p. 63)