In the recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Accordingly, the literary work becomes emblematic of a voyage of spiritual discovery and the text turns into a virtual journey beyond the normal everyday world. Many writers emphasized in their works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern life and underlined the idea that flight, with its different dimensions, is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life and circumvent the social standards and the political regulations. In the postmodern political thought, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from the authoritarian policies of the social and political institutions.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 in the recent years raised concerns over the welfare and health conditions of the human being, and urged people to reconsider their existence amid this unexpected pandemic. Following the confinement that health authorities all over the world have imposed on citizens to limit the spread of the disease and curb the incredibly increasing number of deaths, some people resorted to the realm of literature seeking relief and consolation, and discovered that threats have always shaped the life of humans throughout history. In reality, various authors addressed the concept of menace and presented life-threatening situations in their works. Edward Albee, for instance, tackles the idea of menace in A Delicate Balance through the introduction of a mysterious plague that destabilized the existence of all the characters. Like the COVID-19 threat, the unknown terror in the play put the lives of the family members at risk and pushed them to question their very existence. The present article, then, seeks to explore Albee’s conceptualization of menace in his work and investigate the overlapping commonalities between the Coronavirus and the plague that has greatly affected the perception and subsistence of the characters and mankind.

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In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.