"The Man Who Had Three Arms," is about a man who had three arms.

That is to say a man who once had three arms, the extra having gradually sprouted from his back in midlife, like an angel's wing or a unicorn's horn or a late-blooming talent, bringing him fame, fortune and appearances on all the talk shows.

But as unexpectedly as his new limb grew, it shrank and when the man went back to having two arms again nobody wanted to interview him on TV any more. There was, however, still the Midwest lecture circuit: afternoon talks to blue-haired ladies thrilled to meet even the formerly famous.

Albee's play takes the form of such a lecture….

Will "The Man Who Had Three Arms" be another "Virginia Woolf"? No. It's not the big play that one keeps hoping Albee will come up with, the play he needs to climb back into contention in today's theater. Neither, though, does it have the stillborn feeling of his later plays—"All Over," say. There is some juice in this one, even if it is mostly bile….

The first half of the play is a game of keep-away. The lecturer will tell us what it was like to have a third arm in a moment, but first he wants to tell us about some other things. Such as what he thinks of the morbid celebrity-hunting exorcise that his appearance represents. Such as what he thinks of our pathetic faces staring up at him. (Just kidding.) Such as what he thinks of killer lady newspaper reporters…. But first why don't we call an intermission, so I can have a drink and a cry? Ten minutes.

So far, not bad. Albee's capacity for informed scorn gives the lines real energy, and [it is] … clear that the speaker is in real pain, not just doing riffs on the bourgeoisie. Maybe we will get to the nub of the pain in the second act….

Surprisingly the story of how that third arm came and went is less vivid than the prologue. As with Philip Roth's novella about a man who turned into a female breast, it's a little hard to picture the anatomy being described….

Obviously we are supposed to take the hero's extra limb as a symbol of specialness and strangeness, not wished-for but profited from—and then disastrously lost. It is also a phallic symbol, "Old No. 3 with a will of its own," its loss a symbolic unmanning, always a threat in Albee's plays.

One admits the implications, but the image on the first level doesn't prove out as vigorously as it should, probably because Albee didn't want his audience to visualize the arm too strongly, fearing giggles or groans. Too bad he didn't take the risk. Any freshman playwright can invent a symbol. I wanted to believe in that arm.

You do believe in Albee's description of what being "celebrated" (for whatever) brings a man these days—the big bucks, the willing playmates, the reporters who think they own you—and the things it takes away, such as love. When fame recedes, the love does not necessarily reappear and this is the box [the hero] is in as the curtain falls on his lecture, howling for us to love him for himself, not for his phantom limb. "I am you!" he screams—we whom he's been belittling for two hours. Yet we pity him.

For all its problems, this play is written from the gut. It could be something of a catharsis for Albee, putting him on a more vital theatrical track than his latter dramatic essays in pseudo-Henry James prose on the failures of others to encounter reality.