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Animal house
Edward Albee’s new prequel, Homelife, mutes The Zoo Story
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Peter and Jerry
By Edward Albee. Directed by Pam MacKinnon. Set by Jeff Cowie. Lighting by Howell Binkley. Costumes by Jess Goldstein. With Frank Wood, Johanna Day, and Frederick Weller. At Hartford Stage Company through June 20.
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Forty-five years after it was first performed, Edward Albee’s absurdist one-act The Zoo Story retains its wit, its mystery, and its power. One man approaches another, who’s reading, on a bench in Central Park, assaults him with personal questions, presents him with increasingly unsettling personal anecdotes, and finally challenges him to battle for the ownership of the bench. Quasi-homoerotic, quasi-religious, the play is also a parable about the difficulty of human interaction and the impossibility of remaining on the sidelines of life. Small-scale as it is, and overly familiar (especially to anyone who has spent time around a college theater program), it’s one of the few enduring attempts to bring the legacy of Beckett and Ionesco to American audiences. And it endures largely, I think, because Albee thought it through in terms of acting values. It’s a hell of a workout for two performers. I would have thought there was no way short of disastrous miscasting to ruin The Zoo Story, but Albee himself has dreamed one up. In Peter and Jerry, which is receiving its world premiere at Hartford Stage, the playwright has added a prequel, Homelife, turning his ingenious two-hander into the second act of a full-length play. And Homelife, an extended domestic encounter between Peter (Frank Wood) and his wife, Ann (Johanna Day), spells out everything about the reticent observer Peter that The Zoo Story allows us to discover for ourselves, so by the time Jerry (Frederick Weller) finds him engrossed in his book in the park on a Sunday afternoon, there are no surprises left. Memorable as he is, Jerry, after all, isn’t the protagonist of The Zoo Story; he’s merely the catalyst whose role is to draw Peter into the human fray. The play revolves around Peter. But after Ann’s complaints about the passionlessness of their lovemaking — in dialogue that feels recycled from earlier Albee plays like A Delicate Balance and Seascape — prompt Peter to dredge up a sexual incident from a fraternity hazing that’s meant to explain his careful tenderness in bed, even a theatergoer who isn’t conversant with The Zoo Story can figure out, in general terms, what’s going to happen once Jerry demands his attention on that park bench. (And nearly two decades after David Lynch made Blue Velvet, Peter’s confession doesn’t unearth startling depths about what decent human beings are capable of in the heat of sex.) Albee has also updated the material to the present, which raises precisely the sorts of questions you’re never supposed to ask about Peter. It’s hard to buy a contemporary New Yorker who admits to getting high in college but is embarrassed by four-letter words. And no one who has lived into middle age in a present-day urban center would allow himself to be drawn into a conversation with some weirdo who continues to pummel him with queries about his family and his salary. Pam MacKinnon’s direction, which situates the play in a realist context, exacerbates the problem: you can’t help thinking about the concrete world that the original Zoo Story, with its extreme minimalist setting, never conjures up. Frank Wood (best known for his Tony-winning work in Side Man) gives a credible impression of a cozy, cautious teddy bear of a man, but he runs out of ideas by act two. I did feel sorry for him, though, assailed as he is by the unrelentingly smug ironies of both Johanna Day’s Ann and Frederick Weller’s Jerry. Now there’s an acting choice that makes Peter and Jerry contemporary in the worst way. Day may be up against the limitations of Albee’s conception of her character, but a little warmth would help immeasurably. As for Weller, he’s a gifted actor, as anyone knows who saw him on Broadway as the redneck ballplayer who pivots the dramatic action in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out — or remembers him as the pathetic medical student enslaved by a sexual relationship with his shrink (Lindsay Crouse) in an episode from Law and Order’s third season. But Jerry has to be charismatic, eruptive, unpredictable. On the most basic level of human discourse, no one is going to be engaged by the cool ironies of a stranger in the park.
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