The Sandbox may apparently be a bizarre play, but on a deeper level it highlights a very issue of filial ingratitude discuss.

Grandma explains how she married a farmer at 17 and he died when she was 30. Mommy is their child, who Grandma raised alone. When Mommy married Daddy, she came into a lot of money and took Grandma off her farm to live in their townhouse in the city. As Grandma describes it, however, they put her under the stove, giving her only an army blanket and a dish. Albee shows that Grandma is a woman who has been through a great deal of hardship, yet is only given the bare essentials and no respect. We see this clearly as well from the fact that Mommy and Daddy bring Grandma to the beach to die, a place she does not care to be. Even the way they carry her out by her armpits and plop her in a sandbox to wait for her to die represents their lack of respect for her.