The Zoo Story - Check Out a Different Albee Play!

I know Edward Albee has written much more than "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", but that is the play that seems to get staged the most. So I was quite pleased to see another Albee work being staged. The set, onstage at the Cultch Culture Lab, is as simple as can be -- just a park bench. But with the use of sound and light and conversation, you quickly start to see and feel it as a secluded corner of New York City's Central Park near 5th Avenue and 74th Street. 

Like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", this play mainly takes place as a conversation that gets odder and odder. Peter is a publishing executive who makes $200,000 a year and lives nearby on the Upper East Side and has a wife and daughters and cats and parakeets, and enjoys sitting on this secluded park bench and reading poetry. Jerry is abrupt and demands attention, but Peter does not stop conversing with this out-there, in-your-face scruffy guy who seems vaguely menacing. Why doesn't Peter move away? What is Peter gaining from this exchange?

Things go badly. Just as with "Who's Afraid", one wonders why one or both parties does not just decide to de-escalate. Why this mad insistence on persistence? The play explores the idea that beneath the rational exterior of an upper-middle-class white guy who sits sedately reading poetry, is a seething, irrational core. 

As for the meaning of the zoo, see the play and figure it out. I have some ideas, but I am still working through them. This is a thought-inducing play.

Albee wrote this play in 1958, and has continued updating it up to 2008, to keep it modern. A few things may have changed since. Could Peter's salary actually support a family existence at 73rd Street and Lexington? Would Jerry still live in a rooming house at the edge of Harlem, or is that building gentrified now? There are no cellphones either. But those are very minor points. 

I am a fan of well-portrayed psychological dramas, and this production certainly is.