ction seems to invite the reader/audience to work through the puzzle of his mother along with him. He makes a group project of it--both in presenting it in public, in offering A to B and C in the first act, and then, finally, turning A loose on herself. It is probably sufficient, however, to accept Albee's introduction as a clue to the play's origins without depending on it for help in analysis. His statements direct the reader's attention toward the underlying purposes of the play but these might be discerned without that help as, one assumes, they must be when an audience sees a performance of the piece. In the effort to grasp the woman's character the reader, being deprived of the help of actors, must do the work him/herself.
Critics compared the play to the work of Samuel Beckett, the only playwright "Albee has claimed utterly to admire" (Appelo 355). Beckett was, as Brustein notes, the first dramatic writer to "condense the past and present lives of a character into a single dramatic action" (27). In Krapp's Last Tape Beckett employed a tap
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