All Over

by Edward Albee

Book by Edward albee

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, American, 20th Century

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

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

[Chelsea]

Probably poignant. I should try reading this again when I'm older. Self-delusion and seeking love without giving any and waiting.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in death, so in life. People want love and caring, think mainly of themselves, and are terribly isolated.

[Felix Zilich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Первое знакомство на бумаге с драматургом Эдвардом Элби прошло без особого восторга. “Все кончено” 1971 года - пьеса не из самых известных, да еще и с полным набором театральных клише, от которых буквально сводит скулы.

У себя дома, не приходя в сознание, умирает известный человек. Возле постели покойного столпились родня и близкие: жена умирающего, дети умирающего, его любовница. Еще - лучший друг умирающего, по совместительству - любовник его жены. А также старичок-врач и сиделка.

Самому младшему из персонажей - под полтинник, но соль даже не в этом. Мужчина на смертном одре при жизни, видимо, был выдающимся человеком, а вот налипшие вокруг него людишки - обычный человеческий мусор. Скучные ненужные отбросы, из которых уже давно песок сыпется.

Что случится в конце - очевидно с первых строк. Доктор выйдет под свет софитов и скажет: все кончено, господа.

Некоторых драматургов противопоказано читать на бумаге.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man lays dying in the next room, and his family and friends gather to say goodbye. It’s awkward, stilted, and the characters often seem pointlessly dysfunctional, but this is my hands-down favorite of the Edward Albee plays I’ve read. Which isn’t to say I love it, just that it’s the first one I wouldn’t mind seeing performed. Only with really talented actors, though, because otherwise it’ll be a train wreck. Quasi-recommended.

[Mariana Georgieva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply. Genius.

[Bobby Keniston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the huge success of the playwright's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", both on Broadway and in Mike Nichols first feature film as a director, and the Pulitzer Prize he won for "A Delicate Balance" in 1966, Edward Albee's "All Over" was torn to pieces by many critics and closed after only 40 performances on Broadway in 1971. This despite Albee's (in my opinion, much-deserved) renown, and a powerhouse team, including Jessica Tandy and Colleen Dewhurst in leading roles, and John Gielgud at the helm of the production. The play fared better a year later with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in London, a production which featured Angela Landsbury. Clive Barnes, who felt "Virginia Woolf" was overpraised and considered "All Over" to be Albee's most important work to date, wrote, "It is a moving meditation and threnody on death--- and there indeed is the rub. One could hardly expect such a subject to be popular on Broadway, nor did it prove so.... the notices were almost gleefully savage, pointing out the work's melancholy and mood, the special musical tonality of its texture, and its slowness, without catching its poetry and subdued passion, its operatic grace, and careful construction, its beautiful writing, and, most of all, its grave and noble sense of man's mortality." Barnes concluded: "Perhaps people do not wish to be assured that they too will one day die."

While I do not find "All Over" to be my favorite of Albee's early work--- I am incredibly fond of "Zoo Story", the Ionesco-inspired "American Dream", and yes, I am captivated by the energy in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"--- I do agree that All Over has a great deal of beauty in its writing, and find it puzzling that it failed so terribly here in the states. Yes, it is slow--- Albee uses variations of the word "languid" more than once in describing a character's demeanor--- but it is not without precision and passion, as Mr. Barnes notes.

It is literally a deathbed play. An unnamed "great" man (or at least mildly famous, as the press awaits on the property for word of his death) lays dying, while being cared for by a Doctor in his 80s and a Nurse. In wait are the man's Wife, his Mistress, his Son and his Daughter, and his Best Friend, who is also the family lawyer (none of the characters are given names, only these titles in relationship to the dying man). The Wife seems closer with, and more fond of, the Mistress than her own grown children. Indeed, she is disgusted by her Son (though I find him to be the most likeable of the characters, but perhaps that says more about me) for showing too much emotion at times, and the Daughter and Mother wage an all-out war of words and emotions against one another for much of the play.

I believe Albee to a lyrical and wondrous writer, and there are many speeches that do not disappoint. Perhaps though, it is the number of ponderous monologues delivered that kept U.S. audiences from completely tuning in, as well as the inability to find a completely consistent tone between family drama and Theatre of the Absurd. Albee once said that his three favorite playwrights were Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco (in that order), and this play feels Pinter inspired in some ways--- it has no fear of pauses and silence--- and that can be disconcerting for many audiences.

I dig this play and its language, but at times find it has a "trying too hard" quality for me. Perhaps this is something I ought not be critical of, but I am. I also find that, unlike "Zoo Story", "Virginia Woolf", or a later work like "Three Tall Women", the speeches, while still well-written, seem to run out of energy. Perhaps this was by design, but it doesn't change the fact that, at least on the page, some feel a bit overlong and tedious by the end of them.

But only a bit. This is still great writing, folks, and I would be more than happy to catch a production of it some day. But then, I have never hidden the fact that I am an Albee fanboy in many ways, as it was early viewings of readings of some of his plays that first made me see what theater could be capable of that not even movies can achieve. So I will always presume that even when I find problems in his plays, some of them may very well be my own.

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An old man lies dying in an offstage bedroom. Waiting are his wife, his son and daughter, his best friend, a doctor and nurse, and his mistress, a woman every bit as smart and formidable as the Wife. As long as the never-seen man is dying--as long as a verb can accurately be assigned to him, as one of the characters Albee-esquely points out--the Wife knows exactly what's what.

And then All Over, which seems at times like a civilized retread of earlier Albee works like Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, suddenly starts to feel like Beckett or Sartre, as the weight of the most fundamental question imaginable crushes its protagonist, right before our eyes. A woman who, we observe, always tells the truth, is trapped by a huge and insidious lie.

The play is, of course, about more than this. Familiar Albee subjects like the hypocrisies of so-called polite society and the inability of parents and children to communicate figure prominently in All Over, as does a consideration of age and aging that seems almost precocious for having been written by a playwright in his early 40s.

Fascinating but remote, until we find, almost too late, where the humanity has been hidden.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The characters in this play are a fading man, his consort, his mistress, his son, his daughter, and his best friend. However, the dying man who is fundamental to the play never has a word to speak; in truth, we do not even see him because he lies behind a partition. There are a doctor and a nurse in the play too. The play is about bereavement, about dying, and about the effects which a looming death of a man has on the people whose lives have been most reliant on his. Read it way back in college. So so.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much to like here. A famous man is dying. The press below awaits news of his final moment. In an adjacent room, a son, daughter, friend, wife and mistress do too. While the mother/children dynamic didn't entirely make sense to me on the page, I did admire the relationship between the wife and mistress. The things they say as individuals but also the way they treat each other throughout the play speaks of a curious but believable love they have for the man in the next room.

[Lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This play, in my opinion, is very much like "Three Women" but with a larger cast.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

It had a few interesting moments, but nothing really moved me.

[Evelyn Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pathetic family story concerning domestic relations. Too many monologues that makes it somewhat a little banal. But still very thought-provoking!!!