Theatre in Review: At Home at the Zoo (Signature Theatre Company)

	Robert Sean Leonard. Photo: Joan Marcus

Even in death, Edward Albee remains our most acute guide to the domestic bestiary, an intrepid explorer of the aggressions that lurk under the surface of civilized life. The alcohol-fueled wee-hours games of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? aren't even the half of it. The family of A Delicate Balance indulges in acid truth-telling sessions, interrupted by terrified friends seeking sanctuary from some unnameable fear. The genteel housewives of Everything in the Garden turn to prostitution to finance their expensive lifestyles. The house party in The Lady from Dubuque descends into a state of siege when Death appears, in the form of an enigmatic woman, coming to claim the ailing hostess. Along the same lines, in a fascinating late-career experiment, Albee expanded his early work, The Zoo Story -- the play that put him on the American theatre map -- by adding an additional act that probes the home life of Peter, its seemingly unflappable protagonist. The effort was not entirely successful, and Lila Neugebauer's production at the Signature is, in many ways, not ideal, but Albee's observations are still capable of chilling one to the bone.

Act I, "Homelife," begins with Peter, seated in his living room, pouring over one of the unreadable textbooks published by the firm for which he works, when his wife, Ann, enters and announces, "We should talk." Serious words, those, but what follows is infinitely cagey, a series of probes, feints, jokes, digressions, and provocations, all of them dancing around the dead zone at the heart of their marriage. The talk is unfailingly literate and amusing. "It's probably the most important boring book that we've ever done," Peter announces, hoisting the stupefying tome. Ann, a creature seemingly consisting entirely of nerve endings, airily discusses the possibility of having her breasts cut off as a way of avoiding cancer. This leads Peter to muse that -- and he is quite certain about this -- his circumcision is retreating. The conversation swerves dangerously when Ann insists that she doesn't tell Peter about her bad times, not the really bad ones. "Why bother?" she asks. "To share?" he suggests. "Be helpless together? Cling like marmosets?" asks Ann, the very idea withering as she says it.

And despite all the laughs and memories and conceits quickly tried on and just as quickly tossed aside, the conversation keeps circling back to a barely acknowledged, but hard-to-dismiss, sense of drift. Something has happened to them -- because of age, or cooling passions, or the depredations of time -- that leaves them frozen in their assigned roles. Happily, Neugebauer has found a nearly ideal pair of psychological fencers in Robert Sean Leonard -- tolerantly indulging these verbal volleys and never hinting at impatience, because that wouldn't be good manners -- and Katie Finneran, assuming one pose after another -- literally throwing herself at Peter's feet one moment -- and putting on a determined smile that functions like a Potemkin village, hiding her dissatisfactions from view. Bewildered at the discussions of things better left unsaid, he insists, "I thought we made a decision, must have made one, that what we wanted was a smooth voyage on a safe ship, a view of porpoises now and then." Ann notes that some married couples indulge in rough, lustful sex: "There are people who rise to that -- sink to it, if you like -- rise to that, become animals, strangers, with nothing less than impure, simple lust for one another. There are people who do that." The unspoken allegations in that last sentence are devastating.

Even so, "Homelife" doesn't land with as much force as it might, in part because it looks lost in the vast expanse of the Irene Diamond Stage at Signature. Andrew Lieberman's set for this scene consists of little more than a chair, a lamp, and a footrest; this is a play about intimacy, or the lack of it, and even with the action staged far downstage, the playing area is distractingly wide, and one feels out of touch with the nuances that provide the play with its moments of revelation. (The white walls are covered with what look like random pencil jottings, an intriguing idea, if an unclear one.)

This problem is exacerbated in the second act, "The Zoo Story," which utilizes the full stage space. We are now in Central Park, denoted by a series of park benches laid out in a curve. Peter has retired to the outdoors to finish his reading, only to be interrupted by Jerry, a down-and-out stranger with a motor mouth and no filter -- but what appears at first to be a random encounter with a typical oddball New York character takes an ugly, tragic turn, when Peter is goaded into violence, for reasons that are not made clear until the final seconds.

In part, the plays make an elegant pair: A marital discussion filled with depth soundings of loneliness and isolation, not to mention the banked fires of passion, followed by an encounter with a bizarre, oversharing stranger that ends in death. In another way, however, the plays are very uneasily joined: Albee made some updates to the text of "The Zoo Story" -- bumping up Peter's annual salary to $200,000 and adding a joke about Baudelaire and Stephen King -- in order to bring it up to the early 2000s, the setting for "Homelife," but the seams still show. "The Zoo Story" takes place in a very different New York, one in which the Upper West Side was populated by seedy single-room-occupancy hotels like the one where Jerry lives. Many of the details about Jerry's life are clearly meant to shock, including his description of his neighbor, "a black queen who always keeps his door open; well, not always, but always when he's plucking his eyebrows, which he does with Buddhist concentration." And when the scruffy-looking Jerry announces he has walked uptown from Washington Square, Peter says, "Oh, you live in Greenwich Village," a line that alludes to the neighborhood's former status as the capital of bohemian New York.

It's hard to believe that Albee, who was a stickler for details, didn't notice these obvious flaws; one wonders if, late in his career, showered with accolades and having experienced great commercial success, he hadn't lost touch with the beat of New York life. In any case, "The Zoo Story" is filled with such distractions. Another mood breaker is Paul Sparks' Jerry, who, especially in the early passages, seems to be trying on one attitude after another in search of a coherent character. There should be a touch of menace about Jerry from the get-go, but instead, here we have an actor going through a series of exercises. He improves greatly as he goes along, offering a riveting reading of Jerry's unforgettable monologue about his attempts to do away with his landlady's ugly, sore-covered dog. He also makes Jerry's final act seem horribly plausible, but it takes some time for his performance to gel.

Leonard is equally fine in this act, too, but, once again, one has a sense of actors lost in a too-large space, performing scenes that require a much more intimate approach to pay off. The rest of the design -- Kaye Voyce's costumes, Japhy Weideman's lighting, and Bray Poor's sound -- are all okay, but this is a sometimes-problematic production of a slightly problematic work. If you've never seen At Home at the Zoo, this is well worth a visit; if you've seen it before, your time might be better spent elsewhere. -- David Barbour