[In this review, Brustein argues that "The Zoo Story embodies the same kind of sexual-religious claptrap we are accustomed to from Allen Ginsburg.… Mr. Albee's love-death, like Mr. Ginsburg's poetry, yields more readily to clinical than theological analysis."]

Krapp's Last Tape is Samuel Beckett's latest, and very possibly his best, dramatic poem about the old age of the world. Still obsessed with the alienation, vacuity, and decay of life upon a planet devoid of God and hope, Beckett is finally able to sound those chords of compassion which have always vibrated quietly in his other work.…

Accompanying Beckett's play at the Provincetown is an underground work by Edward Albee called The Zoo Story, a colloquy between a well-dressed bench sitter and a psychotic hipster who accosts him in the park. Out of this dialogue—or, rather, monologue (for the hipster does the talking while the bench sitter responds with raised eyebrows)—comes a convoluted story about the hipster's inability to connect with human beings. A brief account of his sexual failures with both men and women leads to a longer account of his relationship with animals, particularly his landlady's dog which he tried to poison because this "black monster of a beast" was always making vicious passes at his leg. The murder, despite elaborate preparations, does not come off ("I wanted the dog to live so that I could see what our relationships would come to"); instead, the hipster experiences a kind of pseudo-Zen religious conversion. Realizing that his attempt to kill, along with the dog's effort to bite, was really an expression of love, he begins to see God everywhere: in the Negro queen who lives above him, in his lecherous landlady, even in the pornographic playing cards he keeps in his room. And, undoubtedly to prove his love for the bench sitter, he expropriates his bench, punches him in the ribs, maligns his manhood—goads him, in other words, into holding a knife on which he gratefully impales himself. Having scared the poor bench sitter half out of his wits, the hipster tells him, "Now you know what you see on your TV," frees him from the charge of being a vegetable, commends himself to God, and dies.

I should report immediately that portions of this play are extremely well-written. The bench sitter is less a character than an idea (Mr. Square, straw man of the Beat Generation) so The Zoo Story lacks a convincing antagonist; but the dialogue, suspense, and sheer narrative flow of the work indicate that Mr. Albee, who is no Broadway sibling, has a powerful dramatic talent. On the other hand, I am deeply depressed by the uses to which this talent has been put. In its implicit assumption that the psychotic, the criminal and the invert are closer to God than anyone else, The Zoo Story embodies the same kind of sexual-religious claptrap we are accustomed to from Allen Ginsberg. The tendency of Beat writers to invest the French Rebel tradition (de Sade—Rimbaud—Jean Genet) with a pseudo-religious flavor seems to me quite similar to the tendency of Broadway playwrights to identify romantic love with God; and although such ideas may endear these writers to the Luce publications, they signifiy general flabbiness in American feeling and thought. I will not bore you with a discussion of the masochistic-homosexual perfume which hangs so heavily over The Zoo Story except to say that Mr. Albee's love-death, like Mr. Ginsberg's poetry, yields more readily to clinical than theological analysis. In short, Mr. Albee has successfully avoided Broadway stereotypes only to fall into Beat ideology, and Jack Gelber remains the only new American dramatist steering a clear path between the two.