THE USE OF IRONY AS A VEHICLE FOR SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE MAJOR PLAYS OF EDWARD ALBEE

Abstract

If mt is known asthe real reflecting mirror and the revealing pulse of a nation, and ifthe theater is largely acclaimed as the most public of all arts, the pre- war American theater shows the least consistent yet most interesting of all theatrical records. It was a theater that confined itself to reflect the mythologized and the illusory instead of the actual and the real; a theater that is mainly meant to be a national institute for entertainment, lacking -thus- primitive earnestness and validity, and was characterized by compromise and triviality. This came to be known as "Broadway" which turned to be both a denotation of all the plays that were produced in the Times Square district and a connotation of all plays that were meant only to achieve sheer commercial purposes. It was no earlier than the World War 1 era (1914-1919) that America was granted any• real chance to test its ethos on factual grounds and that Americans were granted the opportunity to face both the real and the unknown. As a reflection of this strong impact of war in arts in general and in the theater in particular, there emerged a group of writers who possessed the most original and vigorous talents that America had ever known: Eliot and Pound in poetry, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the novel, and O'Neill in drama, with whom American drama, as a serious and genuine art form, finally came to being. If O'Neill (1888- 1953) will always be remembered as the real father of the American

theater who could attain for it world recognition and respectability, his name will also remain synonymous with the rise of the Off-Broadway theater in America as a righteous opponent to the commercial Broadway with all its passive moral and artistic implications.