There are two Edward Albees, and they are both in The Zoo Story. in The Zoo Story, you will remember, a quiet man who is minding his own business, merely reading his newspaper on a park bench, is accosted by an unkempt, garrulous, desperately contemporary fellow who is determined to make contact at any cost. The neatnik on the bench is evasive; the beatnik circling him is fiercely direct. At play's end, the passive figure has killed the challenging one; the intruder has arranged things that way as a last resort. (p. 203)

Edward Albee #1 is the invader, the unsettler of other men's tidy little worlds, the unexpected noise on a summer day, the uninvited improviser. Not having been asked to speak, not having been offered any sort of subject for conversation, he bridles, invents, mocks, lashes out.

In this mood he can start from nowhere and in no time make a scene. Virginia Woolf, for instance, lunges forward for two long acts, emptying its lungs violently, without our having the least notion of the true nature of the quarrel. Its energy is boundless and gratuitous…. We do not understand why Martha and George behave so savagely toward one another, certainly not before the last act and, strictly speaking, not even then. But the savagery nourishes our need to be engaged as it does theirs. It is a felt presence, like heat slowly filling a cold room and imperceptibly altering the disposition we make of our bodies. We were numb; we don't know why the heat was turned on; but we are anything but numb now.

So long as Mr. Albee is forcing to the surface something that seems not to have been preshaped, so long as he is prodding for response like the aggressor in the park, he is free with his tongue and adroit with his whip. Practically speaking, it would appear that his creative imagination snaps to attention whenever there is no ready-made scene to be played. He may be concealing his ultimate intention, and so forced to feint; perhaps sometimes he does not even have one. But if the situation is open or even empty, and if two people can be persuaded to walk out onto the stage, he instinctively knows what to do. He makes the two people scratch at one another to see what may peel off. Inside a mystery at least malice may be real, and with malice there is thrust and counterthrust, evasive action and headlong action, heads and shins cracking together. If no relationship exists, Mr. Albee will make one. His unleashed intuition runs beyond his intellect, and fury forms before our eyes.

But that is Edward Albee #1, the playwright writhing with great intensity toward a pattern that may never come; the writhing is the play, and as writhing it has authority. Edward Albee #2 is the passive reader on the bench, the man who doesn't want to be bothered looking into other people's lives, the creature of the cut-and-dried. In The Zoo Story the indifferent man has everything accounted for—nights and days, beliefs and rejections, what does and does not belong to the Schedule. That is why he is indifferent. He has no need to speak because his bed is made, his movements are planned, his course is foreseen. The outline of his life has a certain prefabricated animation; but he is inert, having abdicated in favor of the outline.

The resemblance between this chap and Albee the Second asserts itself in several different ways. It may turn up, as it does in Tiny Alice, when a play is so schematically conceived, so rooted in a philosophical predisposition, that the figures onstage have all they can do to keep up with the marching propositions. It is as though they had all read Mr. Albee's timetable…. (pp. 203-05)

And the Other Albee turns up, most noticeably, in his adaptations. Between original plays Mr. Albee likes to tinker with novels he admires, first Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café and then James Purdy's Malcolm. But tinkering is the strongest word that can be applied here; Mr. Albee does not feel obliged to question too deeply the novelist's appointed rounds, he does not like to interfere with the Schedule.

Malcolm is meant to record the impact of adult life upon an innocent. (p. 205)

During his journey of discovery, Malcolm has presumably played out scenes with each of these people, suffering an injury here, a shattering illumination there. But in fact he has played no scenes. As Mr. Albee has fashioned the play, Malcolm drifts—literally, on a treadmill—into one environment after another, observing relationships that are only standstill illustrations, and then drifts off again, reportedly withering along the way. But he has not entered these environments to play a role. (pp. 205-06)

No connections are made…. In some way Mr. Albee is not challenged to discover scenes, not impelled to scrape or to badger or to probe. He has accepted another man's outline for the evening—rather as though Mr. Purdy had employed him and told him to be there from eight till closing—and, like a good bourgeois and unquestioning square, he has filed everything dutifully and minded his manners. The play is written by wristwatch, composed of cursory glances to make certain no chore has been neglected; one feels that, having done the required typing, Mr. Albee, primly satisfied, has retreated behind his newspaper on The Zoo Story's park bench….

It is perfectly possible that the passive Albee, pursuing schema rather than invention for too long a time, may kill off the active Albee, the restless, eruptive, run-on interloper—though of course that would make The Zoo Story much too prophetic and ironic. Albee #1 is the man to count on and to hope for. Starting from scratch he can scratch; and that, very possibly, is his mission. (p. 206)