The zoo story

Introduction
The Zoo Story - Synopsis
More about the company
More about the Zoo Story
Presse

Introduction

Insight America Touring Theater from Seattle USA, tours Germany, France and Ireland from March to June with The Zoo Story in the original English. J.D. Lloyd directs the dramatic comedy by Pulitzer-Prize-winner Edward Albee (playwright of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and Three Tall Women, among others).

The international touring production, Insight's fourth of this kind, comes to Sudden Théâtre in Paris on 24 May to 9 June 2001.

 " The Zoo Story focuses a microscope on the challenge of connecting meaningfully with our fellow humans, " says director Lloyd. " While we laugh at Jerry's funny and quirky efforts to befriend Peter, we also see how rare it can be to make a true friend, to find real understanding in another. " 

The performance is actually an " Albee Assortment. " The curtain rises on a few fascinating short selections from The American Dream, A Delicate Balance, Fragments, and other of Albee's famous works that echo themes and images from The Zoo Story, which is the evening's climax.

 " First-Class actors with a great sense of subtlety ! " hailed the Kieler Nachrichten newspaper (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany) about Insight America's work, " …magnificently comic. Everything is finely tuned, including music and lighting. " The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proclaimed " The roles seemed to be tailor-made for the two actors. " Die Rheinpfalz newspaper (Mannheim) declared, " the actors realize the playwright's concept thrillingly ! " 

The touring project has grown exponentially. In Fall 1998 Insight took the comedy Square One by Steve Tesich on a three-week tour of seven German cities for 18 performances ; in March 1999, the troupe's True West by Sam Shepard did 24 shows for sellout crowds in 10 cities ; and Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet played more than 35 times in 20 cities in two countries in Winter 2000.

The Zoo Story - Synopsis

It is a sunny summers day in New York City. On a park bench in Central Park sits Peter. He is reading a book. Jerry, who has been walking in the park, attempts to strike up a conversation with Peter. Jerry has been to the Zoo !

Jerry gets the conversation going properly asking Peter outright if he minds if they talk. Peter does mind but does not have the courage to be rude and say he would rather read his book. Basic facts about Peter are established : That he has two daughters ; that he wanted a son. And in a reluctant response to less casual questions, Peter admits that he and his wife are not going to have any more children. We learn that Peter has a home on 74th Street, with cats and two parakeets, and that he is an executive in a company which publishes textbooks.

A point is soon reached where Jerry, bored with interviewing Peter, starts to use him as an audience. Jerry begins the first of a number of lengthy speeches about his own life. He lives in a small room on the rear side of the top floor of a roominghouse on the upper West Side of the city. Jerry talks about the other roomers, whose lives all sound miserable. There is a black homosexual who plucks his eyebrows and goes to the john a lot. There is a Puerto Rican family all crammed into a single room, and there is some one else, whom Jerry has never seen.

Jerry also lists his possessions for Peter ; amounting to a little more than a few books, some crockery and some empty picture frames. Peter's questions about the frames cue Jerry's explanation about his parent's broken marriage, their deaths, the death of his dour aunt, and the extent of his relationships with women. Jerry's longest-lived sexual relationship was an eleven-day homosexual affair when he was fifteen.

It is after this that Jerry starts on the long narrative about the landlady of the roominghouse and her dog. The landlady is colorfully described by Jerry in language he considers profane. Both the landlady and the dog assault Jerry. About the dog Jerry talks uninterruptedly : First he tried to make friends with it by buying hamburgers and giving it the meat from them. But after devouring the meat, the dog would still attack him. After being attacked five more times, Jerry mixed rat poison into the meat. Though his intention had been to kill the dog, he would have been disappointed if it had died. He wanted to see how his relationship with the dog would develop.

Jerry, exhausted after this tirade, begins tickling Peter's ribs, which makes him giggle and joke childishly about his own animals. Peter, through his giggles, tells Jerry he has to go. But Jerry detains him further by saying he still hasn't told him about what happened at the zoo earlier in the day.

The bench that Peter sits on, and has always sat on during the years of his excursions to the park, becomes the subject of an aggressive game. At first when Jerry pokes him on the arm, telling him to move over, Peter complies amiably enough, but soon Jerry is punching him hard on the arm and ordering him off the bench. Jerry acknowledges that he is behaving in a less than rational manner, but makes Peter behave equally irrational, first shouting for the police and then almost crying in his furious possessiveness about the bench.

It is at this point that Jerry tells Peter to start fighting for the bench. This becomes a territorial battle. Jerry produces a knife. Terrified, Peter thinks Jerry is going to kill him, but Jerry tosses the knife to Peter encouraging him to use it against him. Peter tries to run away. Jerry catches hold of Peter and slaps him repeatedly. Infuriated, Peter picks up the knife, backing away. He holds out the knife as if it were a weapon of defense. Jerry rushes towards Peter impaling himself on the knife. Peter is stunned.

Dying, Jerry thanks Peter. Peter is at a loss and sobs pitifully, and then leaves. Jerry dies alone.

More about the company

Insight America Touring Theater focuses on recent works by the greatest current U.S. playwrights, which European audiences seldom see. Whereas most English-language productions on the Continent are big-budget musicals identical around the world, or plays cast and rehearsed with actors in Europe, the Insight touring company is drawn directly from the creative pool of a successful American theater.

 " The response to the tours is amazing, " said company member Alan Becker. " Audiences in Europe seem hungry to see new work that comes straight off a busy professional U.S. stage. Our genuineness makes us unique. " 

Much of the planning and design work for The Zoo Story took place in e-mails back and forth across the ocean. The actors arrive in Hamburg just days after the Seattle performances, carrying the entire ingeniously designed stage set packed in suitcases.

More about the Zoo Story

Playwright Edward Albee, author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, Tiny Alice, The American Dream and many others, is the only playwright other than Eugene O'Neill to win three Pulitzer Prizes - for A Delicate Balance (1966), Seascape (1974), and Three Tall Women (1991). He is still writing at age 73.

Albee's plays - with their intensity, their modern themes, and their experiments in form - have startled critics and audiences while changing the landscape of American drama. Albee has said that all his plays " confront being alive and how to behave with the awareness of death. Every one of my plays is an act of optimism, because I make the assumption that it is possible to communicate with other people. " 

The Zoo Story - a fateful meeting of two men of vastly different lives with more in common than they realize - is the play that made Edward Albee famous. First performed almost 40 years ago at the Schiller Werkstatt Theater in Berlin, it moved to New York and was hailed as one of the great plays of the 20th century. With Albee's other plays, it has been studied in English classes around the world ever since.

In The Zoo Story, Peter sits on a sunny bench in New York's Central Park, neatly dressed, an educated family man. Jerry, a scruffy vagrant, strikes up a conversation that is at turns comic and intense, gentle and aggressive, noble and wretched. Jerry's desperate need to make contact both attracts and frightens Peter. His funny and surprising stories alarm and fascinate, gradually revealing his deep disquiet. His clever probing exposes the walls Peter has built for himself with his bland life of work, children and books. His crazy challenge to Peter's self-respect grows into a life or death struggle. In an afternoon, Peter's comfortable life is changed forever. With ironic humor and unrelenting suspense, Albee slowly forges a bond between them, only to destroy it with a shocking ending.

Presse

Pas-de-Deux into Catastrophe
GUEST PERFORMANCE Edward Albee's " The Zoo Story " at the Euro Theater Central

A green park bench and an ivy-ringed papier-mâché boulder - that's all Insight America Touring Theater brought from Seattle. The minimalistic scenery for Edward Albee's " The Zoo Story " suggests New York's Central Park and is wholly sufficient for the Euro Theater. For here, in Matt Slinger and Alan Becker, stand on the stage two actors whose forceful presence even without props virtually threatens to blow the cozy chamber theater apart.

Slinger is the publishing executive Peter : a secure income, a nice family in his own home, a good education - his life a long, quiet river that is abruptly thrown off course by Jerry.

Jerry can't cope with American meritocracy, and vegetates in complete isolation in a run-down rooming house. After ill-fated attempts with women, dogs and cockroaches, he's selected Peter to establish at last some kind of contact with the outside world.

Jerry's half-tender, half-violent solicitation of the clueless Everyman is successful in the extreme : the contact is achieved when he presses his knife into the hand of the bewildered Peter and then impales himself on it. " It's all right, you're an animal, too, " he says, dying, to the assistant to his suicide. Aghast, Peter takes flight, from this day forward never again to enjoy his idyll in the park.

Loneliness, fear of loss, the desperate quest for contact and the inability to communicate with one another- Edward Albee's first play, " The Zoo Story " (which premiered in Berlin in 1959) contains all the dramatist's themes. They appear in even more concentrated form in the short scenes that Insight America director J.D. Lloyd places before the public as Albee Appetizer : fragments from other Albee plays, spotlights on people grasping for connections, who stand, in the end, still empty-handed.

Unlike the fragments, " The Zoo Story " has an arc of tension ; an arc not to be taken lightly and not easy to take. From his first approach until the showdown on the bench, Jerry forces his partner into a complexly choreographed Pas-de-Deux : certainly, the scene sails unstoppably toward catastrophe, but at intervals there are respites in which the tension lets up, Jerry plays the harmless jokester and Peter finds his way back to a conversational tone of polite interest.

In the role of the outcast, Alan Becker leaves nothing wanting ; he reels and rages, is offensive and charming, cynical and witty, intense and irresistible. With sparer means, but no less impressively, Matt Slinger plays Peter, whose amiable apathy and wholesome upbringing must yield in the end to his animalistic instincts.

Albee's declared intention is to shake up his audience : " I believe if you don't leave the theater a changed person, you've wasted your money. " 

This " Zoo Story " from Seattle is no waste of money : grippingly staged, spoken in clear comprehensible English, and splendidly played.

By Gunild Lohmann
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