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.
March 31, 2012