The American Dream is undoubtedly, at its core, a play about the terrifying underbelly of the nuclear family. He explores the ways that one's family has the capacity for great violence, disrespect, even while professing love and loyalty. Indeed, the family and its more tragic iterations was a major thematic interest of Albee's, as found in most of his plays. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, The Play About the Baby, A Delicate Balance, and Seascape all explore difficult dynamics within familial units.
Albee's preoccupation with the family can easily be mapped on to his own turbulent family life. He was adopted at a young age by a wealthy Republican couple with whom he had a strained relationship throughout much of his life. As theatre critic Hilton Als writes in an article for The New Yorker about Albee's barbed accounts of family life, "Albee’s parents paid little attention to him; he was a bourgeois prop, meant to complete their specious idea of 'family.' Albee never saw his adoption as a form of acceptance. It only exacerbated his sense that he was different—an observer, and not a participant." Albee himself spoke often of his incompatibility with his adoptive parents, saying once in an interview, "I think they wanted somebody who would be a corporate thug of some sort, or perhaps a doctor or lawyer or something respectable." Albee's childhood and family life, however privileged and monied it may have been, were always strained and difficult.
This is reflected in Albee's plays. The American Dream tells the story of a shallow and selfish couple that dismembers an adopted child they deem unsuitable (seemingly because of his early signs of homosexuality), and Daddy refers to his wife as "Mommy," a strange real habit of Albee's own adoptive father. A Delicate Balance picks up where The American Dream left off, and depicts yet another cynical account of marriage and heterosexual union. And of course there's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, perhaps Albee's best-known play, which was deemed so controversial at the time of its publication that the Pulitzer committee rescinded its award and several board members retired in protest. It depicts an outrageously thorny and combative marriage between an aging alcoholic and her academic husband. By the end of the play, the audience learns that the son that the married couple have been referring to is a fiction, an agreed-upon joke, the result of infertility. Yet again, Albee writes the story of his own adoptive parents, and renders himself a phantom, a ghost, a fiction.
