Summary and Analysis of "The American Dream"

     So basically, when reading through The American Dream for the first time, I had absolutely no idea what it was about. I just kind of sat there like, "hm...this...this is really weird" So I was pretty interested to hear what we were going to discuss in class. Lo and behold, the point of it all was consumerism. And, from an essay we read in class, it was a sort of "grotesque sitcom" (Philip C. Kolin, "Ablee's early one-act plays: 'A new American playwright from whom much is to be expected'").
     Mommy and Daddy's function in the play was the reversal of gender roles, with Mommy constantly emasculating Daddy by pointing out his faults and calling him a woman, and then by manipulating him with her supposedly seductive language of "oh...you were so masculine.." to get him to do what she wanted. She wore the pants in the relationship, where Albee was mocking the traditional roles of the male being the head of the household and the woman just being on the side to cook and clean. If you think about the stereotypical sitcom, pictures should come up in your mind of a father and mother and son/daughter sitting around a television set, with the father talking about work and the mother knitting or preparing dinner. Here, the role of the child is altered as it is used again to show America's obsession with consumerism. When talking about how their baby disobeyed their wishes, Grandma tells Mrs. Barker that Mommy and Daddy "wanted their money back" (Albee). They mutilated the child as if it weren't a human being at all, because it was doing things that they didn't want, meaning that when something or someone isn't satisfying, you can just get rid of or replace it.
      Grandma is treated similarly to the baby. She raised Mommy, packing her lunches every day and making sure she had a home to stay in, and then once Mommy was grown up and found a rich man to marry and live off of, Mommy began to treat Grandma as a burden, talking in the play about the "van man" taking Grandma away and trying to falsely compliment her with comments such as "look how nicely she wrapped those boxes"(Albee), treating Grandma like a helpless child and making her out to be a fool who was good for nothing, and so when she does something like wrap a box she must be praised. All the while, Grandma is uttering to herself how "old people never..." or "they think old people are..." referring to how once Grandma was done being useful to Mommy, she wanted to be rid of her, thinking there was nothing satisfying that Grandma had to offer anymore, so they could call "the van man" and have her taken away to a nursing home just like that. Grandma and the baby in this way were both just treated as two objects that, once their usefulness seems to have gone, are just replaceable items that have run their course and should be thrown out.
     The Young Man toward the end of the play is the symbol of "The American Dream", seen when Mommy asks who is knocking at the door and Grandma answers with, "it's The American Dream!" (Albee). The Young Man, when asks by Grandma, talks about how he is out looking for work, for anything that pays. Being young, good looking, and working for pay is part of The American Dream.
     Between the beginning of the play with Mommy obsessing over the color of her hat and wanting satisfaction knowing that it was a beige hat and not wheat, with the mindless mutilation of the "bumble" and the careless, "you're-just-a-crazy-old-woman" attitude toward Grandma, the emasculation of Daddy and the appearance of The Young Man as the picture of the future of America, Albee's play was just a huge mock on consumerism and obsessiveness with material goods and the typical gender roles in America. "The American Dream" is classified as a play in the "Theater of the Absurd" because of its strange ("grotesque") plot, extravagant humor, and such themes as "the sterility and lack of values in the modern world" and "the absurdity of man's position in the universe through a series of ridiculous situations that render man's position more absurd".