4 June 2004: Albee, Peter and Jerry
Hartford Stage. Act I: Homelife; Act II; The Zoo Story. Directed by Paul MacKinnon. World première of Homelife as the first act of a two-act play as titled above.
It was a gutsy thing for Albee to write a play that in effect had him competing, decades after the fact, with one of his own best, and earliest, efforts. The Zoo Story is one of the truly brilliant, seminal plays of the twentieth-century American theatre — a play about an ordinary, decent, civilized upper-middle-class man who has an experience that will change his life forever. The world will never be the same for Peter, after he has held the knife, frozen in fear, that Jerry has given him and then has run on, killing himself, and thanking Peter as he dies. I think Albee probably wanted his audience to have, in theatrical terms, the same kind of experience — a play that might raise their consciousness and change their lives. And I think he succeeded in doing that.
Of course, the theatrical landscape, along with the social and moral landscape, of 2004 is vastly different from what it was — what they were — when Albee wrote this play, in the late 1950s. Actually, the play seems a little dated in the near absolute distinction it makes between life as lived on the upper East side and life as lived in derelict West-side squalor. Not that such distinctions don’t still exist, but that Peter seems something too much of a cliché. In his program comment Albee admits that the play was written more from Jerry’s point of view, and that writing a prequel (my term) about Peter’s life in the high rent district was a way of evening the score.
It was, of course, also a way of making a viable evening’s entertainment out of something that, by itself, runs hardly an hour and so gives only scant value for money to a subscription audience that would require at least ninety minutes (to judge from the length that passes for an evening’s entertainment in the theatre these days). Albee’s choice was an intelligent and productive one, adding a female character, Peter’s wife, Ann, who is presented as a decent, loving woman and is happy with Peter and with her life as the mother of their two girls but who also yearns for something more — perhaps more “animal” in their lovemaking. In a burst of frankness she tells Peter that he is wonderful at lovemaking but lousy at fucking, and so introducing the central theme of the evening, the conflict between civilization with its compromised living and sheer animality, the theme of disconnection and attenuated life that remains central as we see Peter leave his apartment and head out for a quiet Sunday afternoon of reading in Central Park. In a sense, Albee had already found the best title for the two plays, “the zoo story” — the story of what happens when you cage animals. The “Story of Jerry and the Dog” is a more specific narrative in the same genre, and its moral — that extraordinary efforts at connection are required in this world, but t