Summary
Grandma addresses the audience, telling them that she had to raise Mommy all by herself. Daddy, she then tells us, is very rich, and Mommy and Daddy took Grandma off the farm, brought her to their townhouse, and "...fixed a nice place for me under the stove...gave me an army blanket...and my own dish...my very own dish!" Suddenly, Grandma looks up, then yells to someone in the wings that it should be darker now. The lighting changes to "deepest night" and spotlights come up on all the characters.
Daddy complains to Mommy that it's hot, but she tells him not to worry. He hears an off-stage rumble, and Mommy begins to cry, anticipating that the sound means "...the time has come for poor Grandma..." As Mommy cries, Grandma shovels sand onto herself while lying on her side. She mutters frustratedly to herself as she tries to pile some sand on herself, and the lights come up denoting that it's the next day.
"Our long night is over," says Mommy, "We must put away our tears, take off our mourning...and face the future. It's our duty." After saying hello to the Young Man, they examine Grandma, who plays dead in the sandbox. Mommy is no longer sad, and decides that Grandma looks happy and "it pays to do things well."
After Mommy and Daddy leave, Grandma seems dismissive of their displays, then is surprised to find she cannot move. The Young Man stops doing calisthenics and comes over to Grandma, telling her that he has a line. He informs her that he is the Angel of Death. "I am come for you," he says, before kissing her on the forehead. Grandma compliments the Young Man's delivery of the line. "You've got that...you've got a quality," she says, and the Young Man puts his hands on top of hers.
Analysis
Grandma tells us more about her biography, but never quite enough to give us a full psychological portrait. In this way, the play remains absurd, an abstracted and impressionistic depiction of a family's dynamic. We learn that Grandma was left to raise Mommy all along, and that Mommy went on to marry a rich man, Daddy. While we can sense from Grandma's description of living under the stove and having, as her sole possession, "her own dish" that their cohabitation has not been a happy one, the exact nature of their familial relationship remains obscure.
More clarity about Grandma's relationship to her daughter and son-in-law comes in the theatricalization of her death. Grandma puts sand on herself in the sandbox in the middle of the night as Mommy cries about her death, then "plays dead" when her daughter goes to find her in the light of day. Mommy changes rapidly from inconsolably sad about Grandma's death, to dry-eyed and expectant of the future.
The "sandbox" of the play comes into focus symbolically as a space of death, a funeral of sorts. The Musician is not simply someone to accompany the play, but someone to accompany Grandma's death, a funeral musician. The sand of the sandbox becomes a substance with which Grandma can cover herself to begin her passage to death, and the Young Man reveals himself to be the Angel of Death.
While it is not precisely clear the nature of the symbolism, the fact that the Angel of Death is a hunky young Hollywood hopeful stands out as significant. When he must tell Grandma that he has come to take her, he nervously announces to her that he has a line, like an expectant child in a Christmas pageant. Thus, the delivery of the morbid news of Grandma's imminent death becomes a self-consciously stagey moment, and Grandma is more invested in the Young Man's ability to deliver his line than she is in the meaning of the line itself. Albee seeks to create some comic tension in the fact that the death missive is a hesitantly delivered audition, and Grandma, like a talent agent, assures the Young Man that he has "a quality."
In divorcing the meaning of the Angel of Death's line from the "quality" of his delivery of that line, Albee exposes the absurdity of people's symbolic relationships to death. This play is clearly about the death of Grandma—and is dedicated to Albee's grandmother—but he writes a drama that defamiliarizes the audience with the typical scripts of death. Mommy, who most dutifully speaks the language of funerals and death—"It pays to do things well," she says of the funeral—leaves before the end of the play, and the audience is left with an affectionate and kindhearted tableau between a handsome young man and an old woman at the end of her life. In this way, Albee seeks to re-stage the typical funeral as a more ambiguous scene. Albee's play is his own version of how a funeral might go, layered on top of Mommy's more traditional (if absurd) conception of death and funerals.
