[The following review praises The Zoo Story's "acute observation of two authentic and interesting types."]

The cheerful news of this week comes from the Province-town Playhouse, which is presenting an excellent double feature. The first item on the bill is Krapp 's Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett. It reveals that author in an unwontedly unambiguous and almost chatty frame of mind. His playlet concerns a solitary and unsuccessful old writer named Krapp, whose singular habit it is to make a yearly tape recording of his reflections on the events of the preceding twelve months. This eccentric figure shuffles around his dismal room, eats a banana or two with senile relish, and then plays back a tape he made many years earlier, when he was young. As the playback proceeds, the old man listens with unseemly avidity to his younger self describing a romantic interlude, and then interrupts, with sulphurous comments, his own youthful rhapsodies on the meaning of life and art. Krapp then attempts to record his impressions of the current year, only to find that there is "nothing to say. Not a squeak." That, substantially, is all there is to the production, but its effectiveness is startling. The tape recorder permits Mr. Beckett to present his hero, simultaneously, at two different stages of his career, and so to suggest, with great compression, the whole course of his life, while the interplay of actor and recording produces a remarkable blend of irony and sentiment. The sketch is much indebted for its success to a brilliant cast, which consists of Donald Davis. It would have been accomplishment enough, I should think, merely to keep from looking foolish while spending all that time in listening attitudes, but Mr. Davis manages to make every ripple of expression speak, either comically or touchingly, of the terrible attrition of the years.

The second play is The Zoo Story, and it was written by a hitherto unknown young playwright named Edward Albee. It deals with the chance encounter of two men at a bench in Central Park. The seated member of the pair, called Peter, is a thoroughly respectable young executive. His accoster, Jerry, seems at first to be just another of those talkative cranks with which this city abounds. His efforts to strike up a conversation are awkward in the extreme; he fidgets around Peter's bench and asks startlingly direct questions: "You married? How many children you got? Any pets?"

The information he volunteers about himself is no less personal. He itemizes his few possessions, scrupulously including his deck of pornographic playing cards. He describes his appalling room in a West Side tenement. He relates his attempt to make friends with the landlady's mangy dog, which has persistently tried to bite him. He describes his attempt to poison the dog, which failed but which led to a mutually wary coexistence of man and beast. All this is presented with a keen sense of natural, spoken comedy that does not, I'm afraid, translate readily to paper. But as the lopsided and somewhat menacing conversation proceeds, one also senses the desperate loneliness of Jerry's life in his effort to make friends by sheer enforced intimacy. When Peter, who is sympathetic but understandably nervous, fails to respond to these overtures, Jerry forces that stolid citizen to do battle with him, and so contrives matters that he runs upon his own knife and kills himself, while Peter looks on aghast, murmuring repeatedly, "Oh, my God!" There is a disturbing suggestion, in the final moments of the play, that the author would not be disappointed if one were to relate Jerry and Peter to a pair of celebrated figures from the New Testament, but the hint is sufficiently oblique to be safely ignored by those who like to think that there is more to godhead than a warm heart, an addled brain, and an urgent need to communicate, like. The merit of the piece lies in its acute observation of two authentic and interesting types, and one is encouraged to expect many more good things from Mr. Albee. Like its predecessor on the bill, this play owes much to its performers. As Jerry, George Maharis is at once sinister and appealing, and William Daniels, who is obliged to do nearly as much listening as Donald Davis, acquits himself with nearly equal art. Mr. Daniels' expression on being told that "Time magazine isn't written for blockheads, ya know" transcends mere grimace to become a species of Higher Criticism.