[In the following excerpted review, Simon ridicules The Living Theatre's production of The Apple as well as the play itself.]

Just why The Apple is called The Apple I can no more tell you than why it is called (not by me!) a play. Perhaps it is not even called The Apple on all nights, but is freely improvised as preversely as possible by the seven actors who use their own names, so as to shock and rattle us into buying the greatest amount of lemonade and coffee from the same actors during one intermission, and to bid as high as can be, during another, for an action painting one of the actors has squirted and sloshed before our very eyes. It may be that the intermissions are the real thing, and that the three abominable acts of The Pear are merely meant to make us appreciate the entr'actes more fully.

The Banana concerns a Chinese girl, a Negro, a pederast, a whore, a con-man, a spastic, and a typical member of the audience who is the repository of every form of vileness. They act out a number of anarchist, sado-masochist, and obscurantist charades, some of which contain a little effective theatricality, a couple of which abut on meaning, and one of which is imaginative and affecting. But it would be idle to detail the various scenes of The Pineapple, beyond saying that they all amount to a would-be stentorian “Screw you!” hurled in the face of things and people as they are. In its more dialectic moments, The Papaya lets out with statements like “Our configuration is like the structure of a nucleus … celestial and out of touch with one another”; in its spicier phases, The Passion Fruit shows us the spastic being taunted during a fit with the offer of a woman, the homosexual trying to stick his hand in the Chinese girl's crotch (horizontally, of course!), and a couple stuck together during copulation brought out on stage in a wheelbarrow. The Casaba is, however, pertinently directed by Judith Malina, and capably performed by all but Marion Jim and Julian Beck, whose rendition of a homosexual is, quite unintentionally, the most potent argument for heterosexuality yet adduced in a theatre, nay, a society rather in need of one.

It goes without saying that, for all its paroxysms and bellowing, The Boysenberry does, or, rather, undoes nothing—except perhaps the reputation its author, Jack Gelber, achieved with his previous play, The Connection.