Flight Path Theatre, May 22
8.5/10
Imagine if Botticelli, a couple of decades after painting The Birth of Venus, had decided to give her a haircut. Edward Albee did something even more radical, albeit with not such a masterpiece. His first play, 1959’s The Zoo Story, was a one-act piece set in New York’s Central Park. Two strangers meet, with Jerry doing most of the talking, and Peter listening. With time, Albee became dissatisfied with Peter’s passivity, and in 2004 he added a prequel act, and At Home at the Zoo was born. The new act establishes Peter’s life. His wife, Ann, spars with him in time-honoured Albee fashion, being slightly bored with a textbook-publishing husband, who offers loving, safe, predictable sex, while she’s besieged by two daughters, two cats and two parakeets.
When she says she wants Peter to be more of an animal, he reveals a teenaged escapade in which he hurt a girl. This sobers Ann out of her sherry-drinking haze, and it sends Peter off to the park, and his encounter with the feral Jerry.
James Litchfield’s Joe Theatre production is sophisticated, bold, nuanced and polished. Thomas Rolls’ minimal set has the second half’s two park benches echoing two sofas in the first. Costume designer Olivia Simpson dresses the characters to pinpoint perfection: Peter’s tie and cardigan proclaim his limp conservatism; Ann’s gold dress and heels her sexy elegance; Jerry’s op-shop ensemble (set off with once-silver shoes from a travelling show) shouts adult ragamuffin.
Helana Sawires brilliantly plays Ann, so she’s funny, bored and provocative all at once, telling Peter how happy she is with heavy irony. Sawires moves with feline intent, hunting a little danger and chaos. Will Johnston is just as good playing Peter, making extant Peter’s inherently shy, embarrassed awkwardness with the acute angles of his limbs, body and jaw.
Evan Lever is a livewire Jerry, who lives in a brownstone rooming-house, where the gin-soaked landlady’s vicious dog is forever attacking him. His long monologue about reaching a wary accommodation with this beast is a cadenza to rival Lucky’s in Waiting for Godot. Lever can be manic one moment, and then drop away to an animal’s perspicacity, as when he says that Peter is “possessed of a truly enviable innocence”, or explains how he and the dog ultimately “neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other”.
I don’t recall saying this before in relation to Albee, but the acting actually surpasses the text. The “new” first act is flawed, with Peter and Ann repeatedly saying “what?” to each other, as if they were deaf or dim-witted. And the Jerry/Peter story is also blemished in that Albee relies on an extreme improbability to resolve it. Nonetheless, he makes the veiled point that we are the animals in the zoo, and these three actors truly excel. They deserve to be seen.
Until May 30.
https://events.humanitix.com/at-home-at-the-zoo
https://www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/edward-albees-home-zoo