The American Dream / The Sandbox extends through to 17 May 2008 Kate Mulgrew to succeed Judith Ivey

The Cherry Lane Theatre (CLT) has announced that Edward Albee's The American Dream / The Sandbox has extended its run by four weeks, and will now play through to 17 May 2008.

The The American Dream / The Sandbox opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre on 25 Mar 2008, following previews from 21 Mar, and was originally scheduled to close on 19 Aor 2008. You can read reviews of the show online.

The play was to have began previews on 11 Mar 2008, but due to company members falling ill, the first preview was delayed by 10 days.

Due to the show's extension, Tony Award winner Judith Ivey, who plays 'Mommy,' will leave the production on 19 Apr 2008 to honour previous commitments, she will be replaced by Kate Mulgrew who joins the cast on 22 Apr.

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 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 is directed by Edward Albee, who celebrated his 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."