Death
Death is the central theme of the play as the play itself is a theatricalization of Grandma's death. While the events onstage do not reflect traditional images or markers of death, certain elements, such as the Musician, and the fact that the Young Man is presented as the "Angel of Death," suggest that we are watching a version of Grandma's funeral. We never see Grandma actually die, but various stage antics, such as her piling sand on herself, and her not being able to move, represent her passage from life to death.
Bad Marriage
Daddy is described by Albee as a small man, grey and thin. During the play Mommy asks his opinion of things, but he never has a strong one, opting to do whatever Mommy wants to do. Mommy and Daddy bicker and rarely see eye-to-eye, but they uphold the image of their marriage for the sake of appearances.
Indignity
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.
