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CREATION OF CRUELTY by crippling alliances [...] must ... eventually ... fall."? — reads George in the closing of the second act, realizing his and his wife’s true place in the world, so that all the repressed anger and bitterness can rise to the surface, he decides, laughing and crying at the same time, to embrace confrontation: “Can you hear me, Martha? Our boy is dead.”*? BRINGING UP BABY Albee’s goal, as A. Robert Lee states, is to show that, using various masks and ritualistic games, he can eventually strip his characters of their dishonest selves, pointing to how society creates norms that lead to identifying with false roles, resulting in a lifestyle that is enervated, empty, destructive, and above all a betrayal to human existence.* Facing this reality is therefore a moral act: the individual disposes of his illusions, all the things used to hide away from the madness of life. It is significant, however, that a person behind such a wall of lies, even if the wall is strong, builds a fundamentally unstable structure that will shake at the first sign of life as it really is and will bury the self-deceived, anxious “self”. The construct is therefore destructive to the whole of human existence, for these illusions will not be fertile ground for seeds of reality and an honest existence: building that wall is reminiscent of salting the earth after the Battle of Carthage. This is where the real game begins: the Bringing up Baby segment, which continues the events after Humiliate the Host, has George in control, and his task is to finalize the destruction of illusions — the exorcism of all lies. George’s arrival in the third act is a symbolic predication of this: he enters with a huge bouquet of flowers and begins the opening of their last game: GEORGE (Taking a snapdragon, throwing it, spear-like, stemfirst at MARTHA) SNAP! MARTHA Don't, George. GEORGE (Throws another) SNAP! NICK Don’t do that. GEORGE Shut up, stud. NICK I’m not a stud! GEORGE (Throws one at NICK) SNAP! Then you’re a houseboy. [...] MARTHA Does it matter to you, George!? 52 Ibid., 174. (Quoted from Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West) 53 Tbid., 181. 54 A. Robert Lee: Illusion and Betrayal: Edward Albee’s Theatre, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 59, No. 233, Spring (1970), 53, http://www.jstor.org/. * 129 "
