[The following review of The Zoo Story praises it, calling it "consistently interesting and illuminating—odd and pithy" but flawed by a melodramatic ending.]

After the banalities of Broadway it tones the muscles and freshens the system to examine the squalor of Off Broadway.

Three actors suffice for the two short plays put on at the Provincetown Playhouse last evening. Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape makes do with one actor—Donald Davis from the Crest Theatre in Toronto. Edward Albee's The Zoo Story needs two—George Maharis and William Daniels.

Both plays are dialogues. Both plays are interesting, and both of them are well acted by intelligent professionals. Nothing of enduring value is said in either play. But each of them captures some part of the dismal mood that infects many writers today.

Krapp's Last Tape takes a wistful look back into the memories of an aging, creaking curmudgeon. All that happens really is that Krapp listens to a tape record of an idyllic day in his youth. But that is all Mr. Beckett needs. For he has a highly original sense of the grotesque comedy of life. Although Krapp looks like a Skid Row veteran he is the relic of an exultant writer; and everything Mr. Beckett says is a grim criticism of life.

Having once studied the sullen method of Endgame, Alan Schneider is the perfect director for Krapp's Last Tape. The scenery consists of a morose library table and chair, an ugly lamp and a messy array of cartons—disorder incarnate. As Krapp, Mr. Davis has very little to say and do. But he makes every movement significant and every line caustic. The whole portrait is wonderfully alive. If Krapp's Last Tape is a joke, the joke is not on Mr. Beckett.

Mr. Albee's The Zoo Story does not have so much literary distinction. Mr. Beckett has a terrifying sense of the mystery of life. Mr. Albee is more the reporter. There are two characters and two benches in his play set in Central Park. A cultivated, complacent publisher is reading a book. An intense, aggressive young man in shabby dress strikes up a conversation with him.

Or, to be exact, a monologue. For the intruder wants to unburden his mind of his private miseries and resentments, and they pour out of him in a flow of wild, scabrous, psychotic details. Since Mr. Albee is an excellent writer and designer of dialogue and since he apparently knows the city, The Zoo Story is consistently interesting and illuminating—odd and pithy. It ends melodramatically as if Mr. Albee had lost control of his material. Although the conclusion is theatrical, it lacks the sense of improvisation that characterizes the main body of the play.

Milton Katselas has staged The Zoo Story admirably; and Mr. Maharis' overwrought yet searching intruder, and Mr. Daniels' perplexed publisher are first-rate pieces of acting.

Although the Provincetown bill is hardly glamorous, it has a point of view. Both Mr. Beckett and Mr. Albee write on the assumption that the human condition is stupid and ludicrous.