If Peter in At
Home at the Zoo is the puppet, his strings are in precarious
hands: First toyed with by his nauseatingly unsatisfied “you’re good at
making love but lousy at fucking” wife, Ann (Teri Lazzara, Schmeater’s
managing director), he then receives a fervent yank by storytelling
transient Jerry (Alexander Samuels). The 1958 play, originally a
one-act entitled The Zoo Story, was Edward Albee’s first.
Peter (J. D. Lloyd), a textbook publisher, meets a boardinghouse
resident named Jerry on a bench in Central Park. Jerry tells stories
about his life, building to a violent climax that takes both characters
by surprise. Fifty years after premiering The Zoo Story, Albee
tacked on a prequel and declared that professional theater companies
could no longer perform the original play on its own.
Appropriately, Peter announces his love for symmetry in the new
first act: He has two daughters, two parakeets, and two televisions.
Even the sets—his living room and his favorite park
bench—are visions of pure equilibrium. While the second act is
engulfing, thanks to Samuels’s superb and comically tragic timing, the
first-act discussion between Peter and Ann about their marriage is more
tedious. It gives Peter’s character dimension, but the actors strain to
keep the terse, challenging dialogue in motion.
In the first act, Ann attempts to reach Jerry, to draw out the
“animal” in him. In the second act, Peter seeks solace in the park and
is instead drawn in by the charming, degenerate, and peculiarly likable
Jerry, who forces out the animal in Peter. But Jerry isn’t kind to
animals—he tells a story about the time he poisoned a dog, making
the once-sadistic creature guardedly passive. Now, he tells Peter, he
and the dog “neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each
other.” And there it is. To put one’s hand out, Albee tells us, is to
risk getting bit. 