Edward Albee’s latest play, Me, Myself, and I, ran for a month at Playwrights Horizons in New York City last fall. It was directed by Emily Mann, who is also artistic director of Princeton’s McCarter Theatre. The play sounds like more of Albee’s countercultural vituperations against the American family and the order of things. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it is non-naturalistic and seriocomic, and is, in Ms. Mann’s words, “a dazzling linguistic piece with existential and theoretical mind games,” a description that to some ears might suggest “pretentious bore.”

The main character is “a bigoted mother who refuses to see her 28-year old twins as distinct individuals.” Elizabeth Ashley, who portrayed the mother in the Playwrights Horizons run, says the play is about “the myth of motherhood nuked,” showing “the underbelly of motherhood, the truth that dare not speak its name.”

More helpful analysis came from the playwright himself, who has taught for some years at the University of Houston: “The problem with [America] is represented by the mother in my play: totally selfish, totally irresponsible, badly educated, and badly informed, believing that what she believes is the truth.”

Yet, the article insists, Albee “adamantly denies writing plays with an overt message.”