TAG’s timely, riveting revival of two one-act plays by Edward Albee —“The Zoo Story” and “The American Dream,” performed back-to-back in a production that opened Friday — shows that early work by the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner remains provocative and compelling today.

“The American Dream” opens with middle-aged Mommy (Rebecca Lea McCarthy) and the somewhat older Daddy (Tim Jeffryes) nervously awaiting a visitor in the living room of their New York apartment. They complain about the leaky “johnny” in the bathroom and an overall inability to get satisfaction these days.

While Daddy tries to read his newspaper, Mommy, in a tailored shirt-dress with a red ribbon in her long black hair, stomps back and forth like a little girl in high heels and boasts about having made “a terrible scene” in a store over the color of a hat. Complaining about her mother, who lives with them and whom she wants to send to a nursing home, “I can live off you because I married you,” she tells Daddy, whom she alternately bullies and pets, making him wriggle with pleasure or dismay.

Fully inhabiting their increasingly bizarre roles, McCarthy and Jeffryes carry off Albee’s acerbic dialogue and surreal images, creating a convincing portrait of a long-married couple with a horrible, unmentionable secret.

Brisk, white-haired Grandma — the quick-witted Jo Pruden — enters, complaining about the way people talk to you when you get old and looking chic in a Pucci-style caftan. (This production sets the 1958 play in the present, but the costume design by Christine Valles adds a nice, disorienting retro twist.)

The visitor, Mrs. Barker, played with sure-footed timing and aplomb by Laurie Tanoura, arrives in the pillbox hat of disputed color; told by her hostess that she might be more comfortable if she takes off her dress, she immediately does so, remaining in her lace and pink satin slip. She used to work at the Bye Bye adoption agency.

Until now, as no children were mentioned, the viewer assumed that Mommy, Daddy and Grandma were merely pet names. But as Albee, no less a master of suspense than Hitchcock, gradually reveals, it turns out there was a baby — “The Bundle” — 20 years ago, but no more. And the satisfaction-starved couple want their money back.

Drawn to this unhappy home is a mysterious stranger — a divinely handsome, unhappy and money-hungry young man whom Grandma dubs The American Dream. He’s perfectly embodied by Ted Guillory with Albee-esque ambiguity and irony: “I am incomplete. I can feel nothing,” the Dream says.

Swiftly directed by Liz Kane, the admirable ensemble walks a knife edge of suppressed violence, hope and regret.

A reader is also interrupted in “The Zoo Story.” This time, it’s genteel, dapper-suited, bespectacled Peter (Stu Hirayama), enjoying his book on a bench in Central Park when he’s approached by wild-eyed, in-your-face Jerry — a mesmerizing Alex Monti Fox in his Hawaii theater debut — wearing a baggy windbreaker and slacks.

“I been to the zoo,” announces Jerry with a mixture of menace and childish delight, as birdsong crescendos and stops.

“You’re an educated man, aren’t you?” adds Jerry, a loner who lives in a boarding house, as Peter, a family man and textbook editor, cringes.

Peter observes, “You don’t really carry on a conversation. You just ask questions.”

Under the clear, bold direction and pacing of Brian Gibson, tension builds. You can feel it in the air between the two actors, who through their accents and body English completely become these two characters of nearly opposite social class.

But gradually Peter, played by Hirayama with comic finesse and almost palpable angst, begins to show stirrings of his inner animal.

Yet these are men, not animals, aren’t they? This, it turns out, is Jerry’s central moral preoccupation. “If we can so misunderstand” one another, he says, “why have we invented the word love in the first place?”

A skilled storyteller, Jerry holds Peter’s attention — and the audience’s — with the promise of telling what happened at the zoo. But first he has to tell the dog story. And, as it turns out, Jerry is looking for satisfaction, too, in a way that Peter could not have guessed.

Albee’s dark, caustic, funny lines are a pleasure to hear as delivered by the terrific casts in these two plays.

While satirizing the American middle class, he goes deeper, developing characters with whom one can identify and about whom one cares, and turning the knife as we laugh.

Hats of all colors off to TAG for choosing and brilliantly executing these Albee gems, which show the guises we put on and lies we tell to hide our frightening animal selves.

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Credits: Directed by Liz Kane (“The American Dream”) and Brian Gibson (“The Zoo Story”); stage management by Kathy Bowers; sound design by Richard, Karen and Ian Valasek; light design by Thomas Tochiki; costume design by Christine Valles. Cast: Jo Pruden as Grandma, Rebecca Lea McCarthy as Mommy, Tim Jeffryes as Daddy, Laurie Tanoura as Mrs. Barker, Ted Guillory as the American Dream (“The American Dream”); Alex Monti Fox as Jerry, Stu Hirayama as Peter (“The Zoo Story”).