In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Signature Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo. Here’s an excerpt.
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Edward Albee hit the theatrical jackpot on his first try with “The Zoo Story,” a two-man one-act play that opened off Broadway in 1960, ran for a year and a half and made its 32-year-old author famous overnight. But Albee was never quite satisfied with it, and in 2004 he wrote “Homelife,” a “prequel” to “The Zoo Story,” later deciding that the two plays could henceforth only be produced together with the omnibus title of “At Home at the Zoo.” First seen in New York in 2007, “At Home at the Zoo” is back in town again, this time at the Signature Theatre, which has a long history of distinguished Albee stagings. Lila Neugebauer’s new production ranks among their number—it is, like all of her work, masterly in its visual clarity and psychological acuity—though it cannot cover up the fact that Albee made a bad mistake when he wrote “Homelife” and an even worse one when he yoked it to “The Zoo Story.”…
The mystery of “The Zoo Story” lies in the absence of context for the violent encounter of Peter and Jerry, about whom we know nothing save what they tell us. Not that it’s hard to figure out what their meeting means: “The Zoo Story” was the first of Albee’s exercises in theatrical bourgeois-baiting, a snapshot of a meaningless middle-class life that is disrupted by a man who, crazy as he seems, is nonetheless fully in touch with the instinctual world to which the emotionally constricted Peter has no access…
Why, then, did Albee make the mistake of writing “Homelife,” which takes place earlier in the day in Peter’s Upper East Side apartment and in which his very nice wife (Katie Finneran) reveals from out of nowhere that she is no longer satisfied with the “smooth voyage on a safe ship” that is their married life? That fact, after all, is implicit in every line of “The Zoo Story.” Hence there is no point in Albee’s telling us what he will show us after intermission…
Since Ms. Neugebauer is stuck with “Homelife,” her only choice is to make the most of it. To this end, she has set the play in a wide, empty playing area designed by Andriew Lieberman whose white walls are decorated with Cy Twombly-style scribbles, planting Mr. Leonard in a comfy chair and moving Ms. Finneran back and forth across a vast horizontal expanse that symbolizes the emotional distance separating them. Ms. Finneran’s performance, by turns fey and desperately sad, is instantaneously involving, while Mr. Leonard brings off the wire-walking feat of being dull in an interesting way. He does the same thing in “The Zoo Story,” spending most of his time reacting to Mr. Sparks, a logorrheic connoisseur of chaos…
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for At Home at the Zoo:
The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the bimonthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.
We wrap up the episode by talking about plays and musicals that we’ve seen in recent weeks, some of which get thumbs up and some…well, the other thing.
