EASY READER: I’m pretty sure the Arena Stage production of At Home at the Zoo is about as good as it could be. Not entirely–the actress who plays Peter’s wife can’t quite get past how obtrusively written her dialogue is–but mostly this is as good a production as I can imagine.

It’s also recognizably Albee. He wrote the second act as The Zoo Story, his first play. Decades later he wrote the backstory, which serves as Act One. First act is marital overcommunication, which is the same as miscommunication and anticommunication, with lots of male sexual inadequacy and passive-aggressive insistence on precision, and an overall sense that love is committee meetings punctuated by emotional violence.

Second act is… well, put it this way: My mother got in trouble for reading The Catcher in the Rye in school. I was assigned it. It’s entirely possible that The Zoo Story would work, emotionally, for someone in the got-in-trouble generation; I’m not sure it can work for someone in the assigned-it generation. Its specific forms of rebellion have become predictable. The Zoo Story has been assimilated.

Edward Albee is ferocious, and he’s been able to keep his edge–The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy is as fierce and challenging as anything I’ve seen, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I’ll see the Arena production next week) is still razor-sharp despite being one of his earlier plays. I’m hugely grateful to Arena for doing an entire series of, I think, every Albee play there is. I’m so excited for the rest of them! This particular play is just not the right place to start with him.