[The review below asserts that The Zoo Story "… gives ample evidence of genuine feeling and an intimate knowledge of certain aspects of the contemporary scene. "]

Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (Provincetown Playhouse) have this in common: both are studies in loneliness. Beckett's play is a sort of marginal sketch in the body of his more ambitious work; Albee's play is the introduction to what could prove to be an important talent on the American stage.…

The Zoo Story is flawed by improbabilities and perhaps needless notes to provoke shock or outrage—comic and horrifying by turn. Yet the play gives ample evidence of genuine feeling and an intimate knowledge of certain aspects of the contemporary scene, especially of our metropolitan area. If there were not some danger of being taken too superficially, I should say that in The Zoo Story certain tragic and crucial factors which have contributed to produce the "beat" generation have been brilliantly dramatized.

The young man in The Zoo Story, who intrudes on a respectable and modest citizen sitting on a Central Park bench, is isolated in his poverty, his self-educated ignorance, his lack of background or roots, his total estrangement from society. He has no connection with anybody, but he seeks it—in vain. When he succeeds in approaching an animal or a person, it is always through a barrier of mistrust and in a tension of disgust, fear, despair. When he breaks out of the emotional insulation of his life, it is only by a violent intrusion into the complacent quiet of the mediocre citizen on the park bench; and that unoffending bystander is then forced into effecting the mad young man's suicide. To put it another way: the derelict finally achieves a consummation of connection only through death at the unwitting and horrified hands of society's "average" representative.

This story is conveyed with rude humor—very New York—a kind of squalid eloquence and a keen intuition of the humanity in people who live among us in unnoticed or shunned wretchedness. We come not only to know the pathetic and arresting central figure as well as the astonished stranger he "victimizes," but through them both we also meet the unseen but still vivid characters of a lady janitor, a Negro homosexual neighbor, a dog and other denizens in the vicinity of both the West and East Seventies of Manhattan.

The Zoo Story interested me more than any other new American play thus far this season. I hope its author has the stuff to cope with the various impediments that usually face our promising dramatists.

The play is perfectly cast. George Maharis and William Daniels give admirable performances. Maharis, as the play's interlocutor, is truthful as well as intense. His acting is both economical and gripping. He seems possessed by all the hurts, resentment and compressed hysteria of the bewildered youth we hear so much about, but who is rarely made this real in newspaper reports, editorials, sermons or fictions.