PTC's "At Home At the Zoo'

In the Manhattan of the late 1950s where I grew up— the setting for Edward Albee's debut 1958 play, The Zoo Story— New Yorkers instinctively perceived the dichotomy between the city's two prime residential neighborhoods. The Upper East Side offered prestige and security; the Upper West Side, stimulation and excitement. If I may grossly oversimplify: The West Side (where I lived) was for animals, the East Side for vegetables.

The Zoo Story concerns a chance encounter (in neutral Central Park) between an East Side vegetable and a West Side animal. Peter, the East Sider, is an anal-retentive textbook publishing executive with a wife, two daughters, four pets, a proper if sterile apartment in a modern elevator building and an annual income of $200,000 (in 2009 dollars; Albee's biographer Toby Zinman informs me that the figure was $18,000 in the original 1958 script). Jerry, the West Sider, is a shiftless vagabond who lives alone in a seedy brownstone walkup rooming house. His approach to life ("Kindness and cruelty combined are the teaching emotions") is demented and dangerous, to be sure. But Jerry's also brilliant and alive— two qualities Peter lacks.

The Zoo Story caused a sensation 50 years ago by exposing the fragility of the defenses (psychological as well as physical) that so-called "civilized" Americans thought they had constructed in the wake of a traumatic world war. Albee followed that up in subsequent years with other works designed to shatter American illusions (The American Dream, 1960) and expose the caveman lurking beneath the organization man or the cloistered academician (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1962). In the process of winning two Pulitzer Prizes and two Tonys, Albee himself became such a ubiquitous piece of the American cultural landscape that theatergoers no longer find his work all that shocking. (The two couples in Yasmin Reza's venomous comedy God of Carnage, currently on Broadway, are direct descendants of Albee's characters in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.) If Jerry started hectoring Peter on a park bench today, no doubt Peter would reply, "Geeze, you sound like a character in an Albee play."

But like Updike with Rabbit Angstrom or Stallone with Rocky, Albee was never quite able to let go of The Zoo Story. In 1981, for a gay benefit event, he wrote a gay backstory (Another Part of the Zoo) that effectively parodied his own original. Then in 2004 Albee wrote Homelife, a "prequel" to The Zoo Story that conjures up the conversation between Peter and his wife Ann that preceded Peter's walk in the park that led to his shattering confrontation with Jerry. This prequel and the original constitute the two acts that comprise At Home At the Zoo.

Trying to talk about sex

In Homelife we find Peter and Ann engaging in an awkward conversation about their sex life. Ann can't quite articulate the problem, and Peter is reluctant to discuss it at all. "You're very good," Ann assures Peter. "I just wish you'd be a little bad sometimes." Their sex, she allows, brings "quiet, orderly, predictable, deeply pleasurable joy. But why don't we behave like animals?" All she wants, Ann insists, is "a little disorder, a little chaos, a little madness."

In retrospect we can see in Ann's character the first seedlings of an incipient West Sider. This proper matron who yearns to find her inner animal before it's too late could represent the vanguard of the '60s sexual revolution.

In his good-natured WASPy manner, Peter reminds Ann, "What we wanted [from life] was a smooth voyage on a safe ship." He'd like to accommodate her, he insists, "but how would we go about it?" Peter heads for the door to reflect on a park bench, thus setting up his Act II encounter with a "real" animal— the much more blatantly demanding and discomforting Jerry.

One obvious question

At Home at the Zoo provides intriguing background to a minor theatrical classic but begs an obvious question: Why didn't Albee write his Homelife prequel in 1958?

The answer, I submit, is that the domestic conversation in Homelife can be imagined only from the retrospect of today's times. The Albee of 1958 didn't foresee the sexual revolution, in which his own work played a part. Only in this brave new world— in which Cybill Shepherd openly discusses her irritable bowel syndrome, Senator Bob Dole tapes TV commercials for erectile dysfunction, and anyone who won't let it all hang out on Oprah or "Good Morning America" is relegated to the world last chronicled by Edith Wharton— could a woman like Ann even begin to articulate her sexual malaise. In effect, in Homelife Albee superimposes a 21st-Century sensibility on a '50s character, much the way that, say, an old man reimagines his youth in light of what he has learned since.

Still, Albee at 81 remains nothing if not provocative. And if he's rehashing and revising old work instead of generating new material— well, there's something to be said for looking backward. Under Mary B. Robinson's assured direction, Philadelphia Theatre Company has given Albee's new-old work as good a mounting as he could hope for (even if the sofa, easy chair and window of Homelife bear a suspicious resemblance to the set of PTC's After Ashley in 2006). Andrew Polk is chillingly schizophrenic as the amiable but threatening Jerry— he is, after all, the animal in this play and consequently the most compelling character.

About that West Side brownstone...

T. Scott Cunningham as Peter and Susan McVey as Ann wrestle valiantly with a more daunting challenge: getting inside the heads of essentially boring people. That struggle isn't as riveting as Peter's confrontation with Jerry, but it surely provides food for thought. (Albee offers Ann and Peter as an example of a couple who can't communicate, yet how many married couples engage in such a lengthy conversation on such an intimate subject outside of a therapist's office and without interruption by telephone or TV?)

One last thing: That West Side brownstone, where Jerry roomed in 1958, today undoubtedly commands a higher rent than Peter and Ann's East Side apartment on 74th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. New Yorkers today, you see, have embraced the values of the West Side: If forced to choose, apparently, they'd rather live among animals than vegetables. So where, ultimately, would Peter and Ann have wound up? West Side? East Side? Suburbs? If Albee can't let go of The Zoo Story, perhaps he'd consider a sequel.♦


To read another discussion of The Zoo Story by Robert Zaller, click here.

To read responses, click here.