Customer Reviews

The American Dream, The Death of Bessie Smith, and Fam and Yam.

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Here is the long one-act The American Dream, another one-act in The Death of Bessie Smith and a short, short mock interview/scene called Fam and Yam.
If you are into Albee and have read his more widely known works, this is for you. As far as I know The American Dream is pretty well known, and can also be found in a book with The Zoo Story.
Written in 1960-61, The American Dream is a semi-absurd sort of dumb show about a married couple who go by Mommy and Daddy, the mother of Mommy who is called Grandma, a women who shows up called Mrs. Barker and eventually a Young Man, ostensibly the adopted son of Mommy and Daddy. The message and feel of The American Dream is overt: comfortable 1950's home life, concerned with clothes and well paid for satisfaction was/is all a show. Each part of the simple American family played a part, all despite any personality. Here, for example Grandma is the clown/fool/ironic sensibility of the piece, as she bickers with Mommy and Daddy and knows all too well the plight of old people, despite or in spite of her advanced knowledge and experience. Without giving away much more, The American Dream is an acidic piece, seemingly very autobiographical, Albee having been adopted, and a slight at the values and mores of a generation.
The Death of Bessie Smith is a disturbing, but surely more realistic slap dash into 1937 Memphis, race relations and female/male battles. Bessie Smith is a backround figure, as an accident involving her and her boyfriend/manager brings them into a whites-only hospital and an iron hearted nurse who laserates the e.r. intern who is in love with her. He's the liberal loving doctor, she's the bitter cold witch...
The triangle between the black characters, including an orderly who straddles the segregation line, the nurse and the intern exhibits overlapping sexual and racial status of the day. Not very funny, as The American Dream occasionally is, but heavy and stark.
Fam and Yam is a short scene between Fam(Famous American Playwright) and Yam(Young American Playwright). When I first read it I saw Albee as the Fam, tricked into saying something critical against the system of "villains" representing the structure of the theatre. But the short was written in 1960, just as Albee was on the rise, clearly the Yam and successful thus is baiting and switching the establishment...I suppose it can be taken either way now.
All three pieces are critical in themselves. Critical of the accepted social places of the American family, critical of the accepted social places of races, and critical of the establishment in theatre.

The American Dream is without doubt the greatest one act play ever written by an American.

"American Dream" is a big waste of time for a play, with overly simplistic names for characters, and a plot that makes very little sense. "death of Bessie Smith" is only slightly better, and "Fam and Yam" is just a bitter author's take on the "establishment" which sounds childish.

I read this book in my high school English class; I found it to be mindless obscenities from drunken characters. I believe Albee has written wonderful plays (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) but this is not one. Here is an idea, don't buy this book, save your money, go to Burger King and observe the dull lifelessness of the teenagers working there. I believe you will get the effect that this book is trying to make.