SOURCE: “Albee's Seascape: An Adult Fairy Tale,” in Modern Drama, Vol. 21, September, 1978, pp. 307-17.

In the following essay, Gabbard finds Edward Albee's use of animals in Seascape to symbolize the human struggle to cope with inevitable death.

Edward Albee's Seascape is obviously not a realistic play. When the two great lizards slide onto the stage, behaving like ordinary married human beings and speaking perfect English, realism is immediately dispelled. Encounters between human beings and talking animals are the stuff of fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, describes a fairy tale as a work of art which teaches about inner problems¹ through the language of symbols² and, therefore, communicates various depths of meaning to various levels of the personality at various times.³ This is the method of Seascape.

The play's principal concern is the realization of the proximity of death that comes with the passing of...