David Finkle, in reviewing the 2008 production for TheaterMania, wrote that the play takes on Albee's "abiding theme: the stultifying American family....Mommy and Daddy are, to say the least, unsympathetic.... the major impression with which an Albee fan will leave is how solidly in place Albee's need was to work out his psychological knots as an adopted child -- and how strong that compulsion has remained for almost 50 years. It now seems almost an after-thought that he's made theatergoers everywhere the lucky beneficiaries of his obsessive search for psychic balm."[11]
The "New York Theatre Guide" reviewers wrote of the 2008 production: "Though hardly great theater, these one-acts give important insight into the budding playwright... Though 'American Dream' and 'Sandbox' are autobiographical, Albee is too complex a playwright to leave it there. He is not just trashing parents who didn't understand the unconventional young man they adopted, he is also trashing The American Dream, vilifying the people who took 'Father Knows Best,' 'Donna Reed,' and 'The Ozzie and Harriet Show' as their model for the best of all possible worlds... Taking our norms and turning them inside out and upside down is Albee's signature, and 'The American Dream' reminds us that we must constantly refine our own version of the American Dream before we eventually dive into the finality of the Sandbox."[12]
Hilton Als, in The New Yorker, wrote about the play : "...is less about what happens than about how it happens—which, in the theatre, means how it’s said. Mommy and Daddy speak in rhythmic banalities. Greeting a guest named Mrs. Barker, Mommy asks, progressively, if she’d like a smoke, a drink, to cross her legs, and to remove her dress. Mrs. Barker responds to each inquiry in the same way: 'I don’t mind if I do.' Albee is showing us the trauma of repetition: the noxious glue that holds his married couples together, despite their rage—or because of it."[13]
