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 sort of sick joke. Apparently privileged by the fact that she is dying, Jo is beastly to everyone…. Now, there is no need for someone doomed and in pain to be that bestial to everybody, or for everybody to tolerate and thus encourage it, but it permits Albee to practice his only skill, however moribund—insult comedy….

[After] much multidirectional animosity and nonstop imbibing …, Jo, in acute pain, is carried upstairs to bed by Sam. Forthwith, an elegant, elderly woman in a red coat arrives in the company of an elegant, middle-aged black; we don't know who they are, how they got in, and why, but they seem to know exactly what is going on and take possession of the place as the curtain falls. In Act II, Sunday morning, Sam comes down in his nightshirt … and, understandably shocked, asks the intruders who they are. The woman launches on an interminable, teasing tirade with which she evades the question, while Sam asks a dozen times, "Who are you?"—a variation, I suppose, on Twenty Questions. Then the black joins in in a game of sadistic obfuscation, until it finally dribbles out that the woman, Elizabeth, is Jo's mother, unheard from for years, and Oscar, the black, her "friend." (p. 74)

The harrowing account from Act I about the horrors of slow dying … [is] wiped out by an Elizabeth and Oscar ex machina. Everybody leaves, and Elizabeth tells Sam a dream of hers about a series of distant, silent atomic explosions. When Sam identifies this as the end of the world, Elizabeth notes they had been talking about nothing else all along.

So ends the play, and Albee's last claim to being a dramatist, and no significant part of the world. The Lady From Dubuque is a lot of desperate pretensions and last-ditch attitudinizing about nothing, borrowed for the most part from previous Albee catastrophes. Let me enumerate the strategies for streching out nothing into two acts. (1) Repetition. Roughly one fourth of the dialogue is multiple repeats, e.g.: "I suppose you should know." "I suppose I should know." "I suppose you should."… (2) Asides. After a character has spoken to another, he will repeat the same point to the audience, thus: "I like your friends. (To audience) I like his friends." About one thirteenth of the play is redundant asides. (3) Not answering simple questions. This, drawn out beyond endurance, supposedly creates suspense. (4) Irrelevant but grandiose political or metaphysical mouthings. So Marx and Engels are trotted out repeatedly…. If Albee has read even one chapter of Das Kapital, I'll eat the others. (5) Obscenity. When all else fails, bring on the four-letter words. Albee, apparently, takes this to be still daring; but, then, he is always a couple of decades behind. Which leads to (6) Ex post facto liberalism. Oscar revels in ironies at the expense of racism as if they were boldly new; they have been heard on Broadway (and elsewhere) for 30 or 40 years. (7) Running gags that, though unfunny, keep running; thus variations on "No offense!" "None taken!" pop up a half dozen times. (8) Mystification. Is Elizabeth Jo's mother, or are she and Oscar angels of death? Obviously Albee himself doesn't know; he has publicly stated that they are not, yet how else … could they get past the locks of an expensive Manhattan apartment? But mystification obviates the need for characterization, which is beyond Albee. (pp. 74-5)

One last point. Albee is sometimes described—most often by himself—as a word-wizard, a stylist. No. He shares his characters' subliteracy. (p. 75)