The American Dream / The Sandbox to close early on 3 May, due to Kate Mulgrew needing to withdraw

The Cherry Lane Theatre has announced that Edward Albee's The American Dream / The Sandbox will close early on 3 May 2008. The early closure has been necessitated by Kate Mulgrew having to withdraw from the cast due 'to a dire family emergency.'

The production has had a turbulent run. It was originally scheduled to open on 25 Mar 2008, following previews from 11 Mar and run through to 19 Apr 2008. However, the first preview had to be delayed to the 21 Mar 2008 due to company members falling ill.

On the 8 Apr it was announced that the production would extend its run by 4 weeks and play through to 17 May 2008. Judith Ivey, who played 'Mommy,' left the production on 19 Apr to honour previous commitments, and was replaced by Kate Mulgrew, who joined the cast on 22 Apr. Now due to a family emergency Mulgrew has had to withdraw leading to the productions early closure.

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.

The American Dream / The Sandbox is directed by Edward Albee, who celebrated his 80th birthday on 12 Mar 2008, and feature George Bartenieff as Daddy, Kathleen Butler as Mrs. Barker, Myra Carter as Grandma, Kate Mulgrew as Mommy, Harmon Walsh (The American Dream), and Jesse Williams (The Sandbox).

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.

You can read reviews of the show online.

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."