Over the course of his long career, Edward Albee has experienced many ups and downs in terms of the critical reception his plays have received, but the lowest period was surely the early 1980s. Between 1980 and 1983, three new Albee plays opened on Broadway - a notable fact in itself given that he had produced only four new pieces (two of them one-acts) in the whole of the previous decade. Yet if Albee, apparently in recovery from alcoholism, was once again displaying a prolific creativity, the Broadway critics proved, for the most part, utterly unwilling to listen. Having seemingly made up their minds in advance that Albee was merely a shadow of his former self, they tore these plays to shreds as if to punish him for having the temerity to continue writing at all. The Lady from Dubuque (1980) was dismissed as “a hopeless stiff” by Variety, “really quite awful” by the New Republic, and “one of the worst plays about anything, ever,” by New York magazine.