Friday, March 9, 2018

Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story

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About a decade ago, Edward Albee wrote Homelife, a one-act play that is set immediately before the action of The Zoo Story. Homelife fleshes out the character of Peter (Robert Sean Leonard; The Invention of Love) so we have more insight into this seemingly complacent textbook publisher before his memorable confrontation with the volatile Jerry (Paul Sparks; Buried Child, Blackbird) in Central Park. In addition, it lets us meet Peter’s wife Ann (Katie Finneran; Noises Off, Promises, Promises) and witness the communication difficulties in their mostly happy marriage. The two plays were presented together in 2007 at Second Stage under the title Peter and Jerry. Albee later decreed that neither play could be presented without the other. Now, as part of Signature Theatre’s Albee series, they are back under the clumsy title Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story. It is hard to imagine a production that makes a stronger case for the conjoined plays. All three actors are superb in their roles. The semiabstract set design by Andrew Lieberman (Fulfillment Center) concentrates our attention on the actors. Leonard turns reacting into an art form. Finneran’s Ann is a sympathetic presence. Sparks’s Jerry is mesmerizing, deftly building the sense of menace. Even if you know what’s coming, you will be shocked. My only reservations are about Homelife. On the one hand, it fills out the evening nicely. On the other hand, my feelings about it are quite mixed. I find the talk of hacked-off breasts, shrinking genitalia and sexual attack downright unpleasant and cannot imagine the play standing alone. However, as a warmup to the main event, it serves its purpose and the main event is not to be missed. Lila Neugebauer, who has a reputation for expertly directing plays with large ensembles (The Wolves, The Antipodes, Everybody, The Wayside Motor Inn), demonstrates that she can also superbly handle something more intimate. It’s a bracing evening. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including intermission.

2 comments:

  1. I see this as three plays: Homelife, The Zoo Story, and At Home at the Zoo. As separate 1-acts, I see the main characters as Ann in the first and Jerry in the second, insofar as each needs something—more life, surprise, recognition, responsiveness—and makes an effort to get it from Peter, who is passive, and it takes a lot of pushing to rile him. The full-length play, however, makes Peter the main character. At the end of Act 1 (Homelife), although there’s not much prospect of change, he has heard Ann’s dis-satisfactions and felt his placid view of their marriage rattled enough for him to be susceptible to Jerry’s behavior in Act 2 (The Zoo Story): he is now the character who has been primed to undergo a change. So when he stays on his bench listening to Jerry, he's doing more than just indulging his curiosity; he is taking a small step toward letting surprise and unpredictability into his life—-a response, perhaps only subconscious, to what Ann said was missing from their lives. Jerry prowls the stage and climbs from one bench to another like a caged animal (this production puts five benches on stage where the original called for just two; did Albee make the change?). Peter at some level recognizes him as the type of stranger Ann said she fantasized about having one-off sex with. When Peter finally rebels against Jerry’s assaults and demands to surrender “his” bench, he is defending his wife, his marriage, and probably for the last time, his passivity and mildness, not merely his masculinity and the bench-as-his-personal-territory. When Peter grabs the knife that Jerry has thrown down, I thought of his earlier concern about “losing” his circumcision. The stabbing, or rather, Jerry's falling on the knife, has sexual implications. What's missing is Act 3, Homelife Redux, when Peter returns and tells Ann what happened. Is he (or even she) somehow revitalized by his experience in the park? I guess we'll never know.
    I agree with you about Homelife. I’m not sure that the addition of Homelife improves the original version of The Zoo Story, which already has plenty of psychological, sexual, and religious ammunition for any number of interpretations and has never failed to grab an audience by the throat. I do think, however, it makes The Zoo Story less feral than it is on its own by shifting the focus from Jerry to Peter.

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    1. Thank you for sharing your trenchant observations about these plays.

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