Albee's Peter: Less Is More

We saw Albee's At Home At The Zoo tonight and came away with opposite reactions. This two-act play has as its second act the "former" classic one-act play, The Zoo Story, that launched Albee's career over half a century ago. In the first act, we find Peter at home with his wife and learn much about him, her, and their marriage.

H thought this illuminated and clarified what happens in the second act, the original Zoo Story. I think it restricts what happens in it. She thinks the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think it's considerably less.

I like the first act, however, but don't think it illuminates what follows but makes in clearer in a particular way, which in turn makes the play more naturalistic, less abstract, less about ideas and more about a particular character. It's no accident that Albee had to go to Europe to find an audience for The Zoo Story. Only after success there could the play return and find an audience here. The European theater tradition is not as wedded to naturalism as here.

The new play, to me, is more American and less interesting. It's more literal and less suggestive. By clarifying the character of Peter, the interpretative possibilities move from the abstract and symbolic to the particular and realistic, or even melodramatic. What was a one-act with a definite European flavor moves toward being an American two-act. I don't like the trade offs

Norman O. Brown quotes a passage from Kazantzakis in Brown's Love's Body that I've been looking for because it applies here. I can't find it but it quotes a priest who has been reprimanded for going beyond a literal interpretation of the Bible, and in his own defense the priest says, in far more poetic language that my memory here, that meaning is never caged within the meaning of the words but flies with the freedom of birds between the lines, that meaning is not text but subtext. Albee's new play, in my view, has considerably less subtext and for this reason is weaker than the original one-act.

I wish Albee had renamed Peter in act one and presented it as a new one-act.

James Sharinghousen & Don Alder

The production, by the way, was excellent. I've seen The Zoo Story about half-a-dozen times over the years and in a strong cast (Don Alder, Karla Mason), James Sharinghousen's Jerry is the strongest I've seen on stage. What he did with his face, his expressions, could be hypnotic and chilling at once. A specially incredible performance in a strong cast all around.