The American Dream / The Sandbox at the Cherry Lane Theatre

The Cherry Lane Theatre (CLT) has pushed back the first preview of Edward Albee's The American Dream / The Sandbox by one week, due to company members falling ill. The show's first preview will now be on 21 Mar 2008, and not the 11 Mar as originally announced. The production is still expected to open on 25 Mar 2008 as scheduled.

Edward Albee's The American Dream was first produced at CLT in 1961 by Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, and The Sandbox was first produced at CLT in 1962 in a collaboration between producers Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder and playwright Edward Albee.

Both plays will star two-time Tony Award winner Judith Ivey (Hurlyburly, Steaming), Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and Obie Award winner Myra Carter, and Drama Desk Award-winner George Bartenieff.

The American Dream / The Sandbox will be directed by Edward Albee. The production was to coincide with the occasion of Albee's 80th birthday on 12 Mar 2008.

In The Sandbox, written in 1959, Albee introduces one of America's most dysfunctional families, a grasping, materialistic married couple who stage a perverse seaside idyll destined to end in the demise of the wife's aged mother.

The American Dream, written in 1960, continues the story of The Sandbox's Mommy and Daddy. It is a ferocious, uproarious attack on the substitution of artificial for real values, a startling tale of murder and morality that rocks middle-class ethics to their complacent foundations.

The play features George Bartenieff as Daddy, Kathleen Butler as Mrs. Barker, Myra Carter as Grandma, Judith Ivey as Mommy, Harmon Walsh as the American Dream and Jesse Williams as the Angel of Death (in The Sandbox).

Edward Albee has described his forty-year body of 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."