Edward Albee's New Menagerie
The Venerable Playwright Expands The Zoo Story With a New Act
Jun 15, 2009
Edward Albee burst upon the theater world 51 years ago with an off-Broadway one-act drama titled The Zoo Story, the tale of a random encounter between two men in Central Park that ends in murder, or perhaps more accurately, assisted suicide. With his recent work, At Home at the Zoo, Albee has added layers of complexity to his early drama by making it the second act of a full length play. Produced by American Conservatory Theater, it is currently playing at the Curran Theater in San Francisco under the direction of Rebecca Taichman.
The first act, titled Homelife, explores the domestic existence of Peter (Anthony Fusco), the reserved, civilized publishing executive who is prosperous and proper, a caring individual, husband and family man. The second act is Albee’s half-century old seminal work. Together they form a new whole.
As a dramatist, Albee is passionately interested in people and what makes them tick. He said he realized for sometime that the character of Peter in The Zoo Story was less developed than Jerry, Peter’s antagonist. Jerry tries to shock Peter into living, instead of sleepwalking through his life, a life shared with his wife, Ann, their two daughters, two cats and two parakeets.
Albee is thoroughly American in his sensibilities. With his romantic insistence on living on the precipice, his assertion that we are smothering our humanity → a large part of which is our animal nature → beneath stifling layers of civility, his is a contemporary expression of a kind of frontier yearning. Civility, for Albee, at a certain level becomes cowardice and delusion.
We are at the core, Albee says, animals. And so we must be, he insists, to live life to its fullest. As Jerry lies dying, he tells Peter: "... you're not really a vegetable; it's alright you're an animal. You're an animal, too."
Albee sits atop the American pantheon of postwar dramatists, alongside Tennessee Williams. But Albee’s message is the opposite of Williams. At the core of William’s plays is horror at the human capacity for cruelty and the pain we inflict on each other. Albee insists that cruelty is necessary. As Jerry says, kindness and cruelty combined together at the same time are "the teaching emotion." William’s menagerie is made of glass; Albee’s is made of flesh and blood and other bodily fluids.
A Diorama
A.C.T. set designer Robert Brill said he and director Taichman approached the production with a minimalist sensibility. In Act I Brill presents Peter and Ann’s apartment as a diorama, a kind of doll house apart from real life. The apartment is painted white with off-white, Danish Modern furniture. There is no art, no color, no decoration, only a white orchid on an end table.
Peter is sitting on the sofa reading at the beginning of Act I. Ann (René Augusen) enters and wants to talk about their sex life. She wishes Peter were more of an animal in bed. "You’re good at making love," she tells him, "but you’re terrible at ****ing." During the rest of their conversation she reveals her deep dissatisfaction with their safe existence. Ann as played by Augesen is a woman who loves her kind husband, but sees life slipping away from her and desperately wants a chance to live it before it’s gone.
A Trip to the Zoo
Act II, The Zoo Story, again begins with Peter reading, this time on a park bench. Gone are the sterile white walls. Instead there is glowing green field of color behind him. Enter Jerry (Manoel Feliciano), who mutters his famous opening line, "I’ve been to the zoo." He piques Peter’s interest with just the right combination of mystery, charm and craziness.
Whereas Peter’s life is full of matched sets → husband-wife, daughters, cats, birds → Jerry is a loner in a world of unmatched people and animals. Feliciano’s Jerry is a streetwise orphan, with the jittery restlessness of a man on the edge, making it up as he goes along.
The new expanded version of the play does offer us a fuller view of the character of Peter as Albee wished, and Fusco does a good job of portraying him as a man frightened of his own impulses. In the hands of a lesser playwright building an act around the character of Peter would be a problem. The emotions that drive him to want his life to be a "a pleasant voyage on a calm sea" could easily make him like the textbooks he publishes: boring. But the added act gives Albee a large canvas to paint the portrait of a complex man full of humor and compassion but ultimately of limited vision. And that is his tragedy.
Now an octogenarian, Albee continues to explore and promote his message: Life should be lived at the precipice; you will not regret what you did, only what you didn’t do. Originally seen as an heir of Beckett, Ionesco and Theater of the Absurd, he has gone beyond categorization and become America's greatest living playwright. After falling out of favor, he returned to Broadway in the late 1990s and has remained enthroned there.
At Home at the Zoo runs on the main stage through July 5, 2009. For show times and more information visit the American Conservatory Theater website..
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