Box

by Edward Albee

Provocative and challenging theatre by one of our most important playwrights, in which traditional dramatic structure is replaced by an abstract, contrapuntal form of striking effectiveness.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre

88 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.

People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.

Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Reviews

[Bernard Norcott-mahany · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a strange work. A short play called box, which features the outline of a large box on stage, lit, with a voiceover of the box's thoughts. In "Quotations," we have Mao speaking as if a teacher to the audience, with actual quotations from the "Little Red Book," while a crazy woman rambles on to a minister (silent throughout) about her life, and another old woman quotes snatches from an old song about going to the poorhouse. The box also comments. I'd have to see the piece to get the humor here. I kept sensing that the work could be very funny, but only had a sense of it being strange and rather sad.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 1 out of 5]

Surprisingly insufferable.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’ve ever seen the episode of How I Met Your Mother where Barney mocks experimental theatre, Box and Quotations is likely ruined for you. I’m pretty sure some of the lines from Box and Quotations were paraphrased in that How I Met Your Mother episode, which may be plebian entertainment, but it at least has a plot. Also, it was hilarious.

Pushing artistic boundaries is great, but that doesn’t mean a project is good. Not recommended.

[Wes Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

words pretty much escape me when I try to say how great these two plays are. such social weight...

[Edward Amato · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am still processing this. I would have preferred seeing it on stage rather than reading it. Perhaps that would keep me from being so perplexed over the Box part of these plays. I did read some background on Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and have just finished reading a novel that covered Mao's disastrous attempt to rewire Chinese agriculture during the late 1950s. Still leaves me scratching my noggin BUT it was intriguing.

[Jojo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Review: Have no clue how you'd summarize this as it seems to just be people talking separately with no connection. So bizarre. If it wasn't as short as it was, it probably would have been a DNF (and my first on goodreads now that it's an option!). I didn't get it or like it at all.
It's an F for me.

[christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is very intriguing, but I think you'd have to see it on the stage to really get it.