Whenever I review a play by Edward Albee, I worry about the distribution of his royalties. He has such a perfect gift for theatrical mimicry that I begin to imagine August Strindberg, Eugene O'Neill, and T. S. Eliot rising from their graves to demand for their estates a proper share of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tiny Alice, and A Delicate Balance. Even living authors like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter might be contemplating a case against Albee, not so much for expropriating their plots and characters as for borrowing their styles. In his latest play, The Lady From Dubuque,… the playwright has gone to an unusual source—namely himself. I can see a lawsuit coming—Albee v. Albee—where the younger accuses the older writer of plagiarism, perhaps even alienation of affection and breach of promise.

Albee certainly has breached his promise in his last 11 plays, not excepting The Lady From Dubuque. It is really quite an awful piece, drenched with those portentous religious-philosophical discharges about death and truth and illusion that have been swamping his work ever since he got the preposterous idea in his head that he was some kind of … prophet and metaphysician of our disorders. I felt acutely embarrassed for actors charged with saying things like "Everything is true … therefore nothing is true … therefore everything is true." If that is true, then they ought to stop talking altogether. Unfortunately, they don't. And the characters they are given to play are not much improvement on their dialogue.

Collected together in a living room that looks more like the first-class lounge on the SS United States are three mismatched couples who spend the opening minutes of this two-hour evening bitching at each other, when they are not looking around … for their lost identities…. [Basically, the characters] are your average run-of-the-mill Albee scorpions, and while they are depositing some diluted venom into each other's necks, the heroine (who is dying of cancer) curls up every so often in a question mark of pain and screams….

Still, Albee faking Albee is better than Albee faking Eliot, if you're measuring degrees of fakery. I found enough faint echoes of the old ripper in the play to keep my eyelids from closing—as they did … in All Over, and Albee's other boring discourses on mortality. Every so often, a little wave of energy courses through the dead electrical circuits of the work, as when a character says, "My cup runneth over," and another replies, "Right, but watch the rug." A little more of this stuff, and I might have snapped awake entirely, but Albee's heart is no more in the bickering of his couples than in the suffering of his heroine. Perhaps the ghastly reception and quick closing of this play will get him angry enough to give up the metaphysical gush and get back to his proper work—cutting the jugulars of his unfortunate American contemporaries. (p. 26)