The task of bringing Edward Albee to the stage is a unique one. Unlike Shakespeare or Stoppard, the casts are small. The visuals are minimal. There is very little, beyond the dialogue. What sets Edward Albee apart from the rest of the pure-bred pack of famous and prolific writers is his exclusive mastery of language, his fixation on it above all other dramatic considerations.

Other writers might focus on story, narrative, drama and message, treating language as a tool to those other ends. Albee's values are inverted: His drama, story, message and all come as a byproduct of his language-a happy accident. To an almost inhuman degree, the plays of Edward Albee, from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to the amalgam in question, "At Home at the Zoo," positively celebrate language, exploring it with a degree of awareness that boggles the mind.

"At Home at the Zoo" exists in an interesting space. It consists of two one-act plays, "Homelife" and "The Zoo Story." "The Zoo Story" was written in 1958, the one-act play that put Albee on the map. "Homelife" was written in 2004 at the end of Albee's extraordinary career. Presented together as one narrative whole, the two of them allow a fascinating view on Albee's evolution as a writer. The slow, measured conversation held between mild-mannered Peter (Anthony Fusco) and his wife Ann (Rene Augesen) clashes jarringly with the breakneck, sharp repartee that occurs between Peter and the garrulous Jerry (Manoel Felciano), a vagrant. For this, if nothing else, the play is worth seeing: an entire career, compressed into two hours.

As a specific production of this play, however, the American Conservatory Theater's "At Home at the Zoo" falls short. The writing is so strong that staging it becomes a Herculean task. This may seem illogical-that a better play will be harder to do well. It isn't. Unless the production absolutely nails the language, it's nothing special. The language eclipses almost everything. The production design is tasteful, as ACT shows tend to be. The sets are designed with an almost Spartan simplicity: "Homelife" calls for a table, sofa and ottoman. "The Zoo Story": a single park bench. IKEA furnishings do the job well, but set design is worth absolutely nil in this play.

It's not just the furniture-virtually nothing can add to this work. "Homelife" is an hour-long conversation between a long-married couple. Nothing interrupts-the audience listens to them talk. About his job, about dinner. About birds. For an hour. The entire time, the audience is riveted. Albee's language is a harp, subtle and deep. There are many surface delights, but the true richness is under the surface, a few feet down.

An average production can nail the main points and wow an audience. Few productions, however, can really get inside the language and elevate it to another level. Without giving too much away, at some point a knife enters the story. In a mediocre show, the audience will notice the knife. In a rather good performance, the audience will become very interested in the knife. In a winning performance, however, the audience will shriek.

In the original 2004 off-Broadway performance of this play, when it was called "Peter and Jerry," the audience shrieked. This time, they were, at best, intrigued. The moment was both rushed into and rushed away from. Felciano had been too intense in the moments before the knife and not intense enough afterward. The tension, a plentiful resource in the realm of Albee, was not managed well. This may seem like an extraordinarily granular analysis-but this is a play that demands a granular analysis. Compared to most other plays, it is fantastic. But as a production, compared to other productions, it is nothing special.

Edward Albee's writing is universal and timeless-it addresses the most crucial facets of human communication and charges the space between sentences with enough electricity to execute an elephant. Not a very comfortable play, ACT's "At Home At the Zoo" is well executed but not unique or transcendent.