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.