American playwrights and screenwriters seem to have run out of timely issues and borrowed subjects and, since the late seventies, to have hit upon one which the great world dramatists have treated for centuries with greater insight and less arrogance and glibness: death. With The Lady from Dubuque Edward Albee takes his place among a cadre of recent Americans who have focused on this ultimate of passage rites.

Sam and his wife Jo, a victim of some terminal form of cancer, give parties for and play parlor games with a seemingly masochistic group of friends. The play opens during one such gathering. (p. 473)

The second act focuses on the appearance of the mysterious Elizabeth, an angel of death—cum-mama who, with her black friend Oscar, takes over the house with several brilliantly executed acts of psychological terrorism…. After repeated postulations of the question "Who are you?" throughout the play (most tellingly by Elizabeth in the second act), Sam, as a result of this symbolic sacrifice, discovers who he is and learns finally that his emotional dependence on Jo was robbing him of his individuality.

If the above sounds a bit familiar, it is because much of the work borrows from past successes while it leaves the craft to stand alone and naked, an empty echo of the depth and sensitivity found in The American Dream, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance. Many of the old concerns are resuscitated: the disintegration of American society, the quest for human identity in the face of inexorable technology, the call for individualism in a pluralistic and threatened society. Skeletons which have had Americans scurrying with guilt-ridden tails between their legs are flashed before us. Communism, racism, the bomb, pathologically excessive momism, consumerism and even New Jersey (which Albee seems to loathe) receive their share of attention. It would appear that in dealing with these past themes in the light of the present subject of death, Albee seeks to point to what he sees as a society in its death throes. He offers as the only alternative, the sole means for survival, a retreat into the self, a world in which trust and dependence are placed entirely in the individual self. Hence the recurring question: "Who are you?" becomes the thematic leitmotiv.

Many of the elements of an important work are clearly present. One notes immediately the classic use of ritual and symbol, the near-Aristotelian cleanliness of arrangement and the command of language so familiar to Albee's admirers. It is unfortunate for Lady from Dubuque that these do not suffice. For despite its moments of brilliance and poetry, the play is marred by an extreme self-consciousness as reflected in the dialogue, in the dredging up of old causes and personal dislikes, in the rehash of old characters and techniques and in the ill-advised use of the direct audience address, which fails miserably in this instance. But most of all it suffers from a lack of any real penetration of character or situation beyond what is needed to convey Albee's dicta. The Lady from Dubuque may be exciting theatre, but it cannot be counted among Albee's great works. To fashion one that can, he will have to abandon formulae and explore the human condition from a new, uncluttered, less didactic point of view. (pp. 473-74)