At Home at the Zoo
In Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo (the two-act repackaging of his iconic The Zoo Story), anarchy reaches out to tap average on the shoulder. Directors Barton Bund and Lynch Travis together helm the Detroit Ensemble Theatre production, an audacious piece of counterprogramming that delights in throwing an elbow at normalcy, but struggles to merge the thickly drawn borders of its disparate scenarios.
“Home Life” is the title of the first act: a frank domestic conversation between mild-mannered Peter (Joseph Fournier) and sensible wife Ann (Eva Rosenwald) in their Manhattan apartment, pets and children in absentia. The piece is remarkable for capturing the familiar newness of people who, despite knowing each other intimately, haven’t ventured outside the literal and logistical in far too long. Over the course of their bemusing, cautiously titillating exchange of hypotheticals, Fournier and Rosenwald work together like a pair of sine waves stuttering to break out of their circuitous parallel rhythms; what the approach lacks in moments of clumsy make-work staging, it excels in carefully halting pacing and furrowed false starts — a static pairing rendered effectively dynamic.
Nearby Central Park is the setting for the one about the zoo, in which Peter is approached by disheveled Jerry (Steven O’Brien) and abruptly enlisted into another conversation. Although not overtly menacing, this Jerry is plenty unsettling from the outset; the choice requires some suspension of disbelief, as the reason why Peter willingly stays and subjects himself to the machinations of a shifty, tic-addled transient only seems to get less discernible with time. In itself, though, the illustrious role is a meaty one, and O’Brien inhabits Jerry with a zealous, terrifying commitment that forgives much of the accordant dissonance. Coupled with the clearly ruffled unease of Fournier’s upright citizen, the performance feels genuinely unpredictable, driving the thrillingly hateful story of Jerry’s life and value system.
Although the relationships and atmospheres couldn’t feel more different, the two acts echo the playwright’s clear voice with the same skewed tone, creating an off-putting world whose inhabitants long to communicate, but grow easily frustrated with the result. Bund is credited with the production design, filling the black-box Michigan Actors Studio space with proficiently frenetic jazz instrumentals and radiating an expansive pattern across the floor toward a starkly monolithic back wall. Furnishings and properties are spare, requiring only the basest sense of place and no distractions from the word play that puts the characters ever at cross purposes.
In aggregate, Albee’s pairing of these complementary one-acts written more than a half-century apart is fascinating in theory, but challenging in practice, the theatrical equivalent of smashing two bars of soap together and presenting them as a single unit. The playwright-imposed hurdle isn’t quite cleared here; the parts can’t help but feel like parts, connected by the shared character of Peter. Regardless, the craft in this At Home at the Zoo is evident and skillful: even without the conventional single arc viewers are conditioned to expect, there’s enjoyment to reap in its heady language and astonishing end-around abstractions of human behavior.
March 31, 2012