Finding the Sun

by Edward Albee

Book by Edward Albee

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Fiction, Drama

Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.

People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.

Albee described his 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."

Reviews

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Seems like a fun play to perform, and I did enjoy many elements of it, but I suspect Albee was experimenting with Harold Pinter's "what the fuck does that MEAN???" school of play writing at this point.

[Christopher Antimie · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Finding the Sun” by Edward Albee is largely concerned with consciousness. The sun along with the beach and the ocean seems to cause all the characters' thoughts and desires to be openly revealed- no one hides in the shadows. In Edmee’s words: “...finding the sun should always be your first action.” The play explores the positive and negative effects of exposure to consciousness. At the beginning of the play, the characters are excited to indulge in the beach’s sunlight for the illumination and warmth it provides. Soon, characters are sharing secrets with strangers left and right, and whether or not this is appropriate behavior is called into question. A mother is compelled to confess sexual desires for her son to a woman who has had four skin cancers removed and yet can not stay out of the sun (this might also have to do with the fact that she suffers lapses in consciousness). A gay man flaunts his true feelings in front of his partner which drives her to the point of wanting the sun to be extinguished. An adolescent boy and a geriatric man discuss alienation at both extremes of the age spectrum. Ultimately, the audience is left to ask whether “...there’s danger in consciousness, in too much awareness.”

While the imagery and some of the conceptual ideas are done well and are certainly interesting, I am not usually a fan of art that is so direct and open with its intended themes, especially when they are not focused. At times I get the sense that the author is bashing the audience over the head with a blunt object. At other times I question whether or not the author is simply confessing insecurities about their own life through their characters; this was felt at several points including during monologues regarding imminent death and conversations about realized vs unrealized potential; the seemingly irrelevant appearance of incestual themes was also concerning.

For as much of the thematic content is more or less told directly to the audience, the play is left open-ended enough to allow ample room for interpretation. Why does Fergus disappear? Why does Abigail fail to drown herself? What does it mean that she gets the idea from speaking with Edmee?

The above was a brief writeup for the creative writing class I am taking at the moment. The question for my goodreads friends is whether or not you should bother with this one. And the answer is "no".

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Albee writes in the beginning author's note that Finding the Sun was written in 1983 "to satisfy a commission from the University of Northern Colorado". Maybe a poor choice of words, but maybe spot on, because this one feels like little more than a fulfilled obligation. Albee goes on to ex(com)plain that Tina Howe's Coastal Disturbances debuted off-broadway in the year he was preparing a staging and that the two were close in setting and "general preoccupations" for him to feel instinctually right in going ahead with it. I can only assume it happened somewhere sometime but the world probably would have been ok if not. What we have here is a malnourished proto-"White Lotus" kind of story in which everyone judges themselves and each other seaside. The "shock of the gay" bits here are particularly aggravating in a modern read.

[Micah Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good beach play, everyone says what they're thinking instead of subtext