Close Encounters

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The New York Sun

The pipe-smoking, stable Peter may get the better of his Central Park confrontation with the nihilistic Jerry in “The Zoo Story,” Edward Albee’s seminal 1958 one-act about two very different men crossing paths on a fateful Sunday, but history has clearly crowned Jerry as the leading player. Mr. Albee once called these men “the two Edwards, the one who lived back in Larchmont and the one who lives in New York City,” and there is little doubt as to where the 29-year-old author’s sympathies lay at the time.

But perhaps every Peter, to paraphrase a frequent political maxim, is a Jerry who’s been mugged. And so, 45 years later, the Larchmont in Mr. Albee prompted him to flesh out the seemingly humdrum existence of Peter, heretofore a mild-mannered textbook publishing executive who spends much of “The Zoo Story” listening uneasily to Jerry’s baroque ramblings. The result — 2003’s eye-opening prequel, “Homelife,” now shares the stage with its seminal forebear in a sure-footed double bill called “Peter and Jerry” that kicks off an Albee-centric season (it’s the first of four major productions scheduled for the New York area in the next six months) on a positive note.

Picking up the thread of a long-ago phenomenon can be treacherous; an author’s subsequent experiences make it almost impossible to re-enter the enshrined lives of his or her creations with any level of fidelity, and the disjunct between what was and what is can split the seams of a narrative faster than you can say “The Godfather Part III.” But Mr. Albee, who has returned to certain core themes — the unknowability of loved ones, the gamesmanship employed to circumvent or even vanquish mortality — repeatedly, over the decades, has beaten the odds here, recalibrating Peter’s blinkered world view with impressive ease.

The events of “Homelife,” which is directed crisply and empathically by Pam MacKinnon, are nowhere near as cataclysmic as what follows. Still, Peter (Bill Pullman) has his hands full at home, too. Jerry, we learn, isn’t alone in his contempt for the tidy domesticity of Peter’s life, with his two daughters and two cats and two parakeets. Peter and his vaguely unfulfilled wife, Ann (Johanna Day), harbor their own fantasies of fur- and feather-flying carnage; only gradually do they train their animosity toward each other.

After Ann and Peter each contemplate the diminishment of their sexual faculties, the conversation veers into whether it’s permissible or even desirable for brutal passions to hold sway over a loving couple. “Where’s the … the rage, the … animal?” Ann asks. Peter disputes this idea and, with an explicitness that would have been unimaginable in 1958, defends his caution by recounting an “exciting and disgusting” sexual experience from college. (It bears more than a passing resemblance to the taboo-shattering monologue at the end of “The Goat,” which featured Mr. Pullman as another of Mr. Albee’s troubled mensches.)

Mr. Pullman creates a memorable Peter — fidgety, distracted, uncertain how or when good behavior became a bad thing. Ms. Day, the only carryover from the 2003 regional premiere of “Homelife,” obviously has her work cut out for her playing the late arrival, but she indelibly creates a woman who is every bit the equal of Mr. Albee’s durable combatants. Her Ann has learned to weather her husband’s drifts and gaps with a hard-earned sense of humor and a mildly hostile solicitude, and their guarded interactions bear the ironic scars of a marriage that has progressed with “no jagged edges,” seemingly to Peter’s satisfaction and Ann’s regret.

Eventually, of course, Peter must take his leave of Ann and walk to his beloved bench in Central Park, where the “permanent transient” Jerry (a slightly mannered but overall effective Dallas Roberts) arrives itching to tell Peter what happened to him at the zoo. His seemingly random observations coalesce into a withering condemnation of mankind’s ability to get along with one another, of a world where “the teaching emotion” is a blend of kindness and cruelty. “And what is gained,” Jerry explains, “is loss.” Ms. MacKinnon’s sense of pacing flags somewhat as the tensions between the two men flare, subside, and crest again, but after almost 50 years, “The Zoo Story” retains much of its generation-defining punch.

With “Homelife,” Mr. Albee, in his elliptical and inimitably jovial manner, has finally told the zoo story that Jerry never quite gets around to telling. Ann signals this when she ruefully abandons the idea of animalistic passion. “We can have it bred out of us,” she laments. “Learned away.” This once feral man and woman have been cordoned off, domesticated, reduced to spinning fantasies about the cats eating the parakeets. Jerry is at once the zookeeper, the gawking visitor, and the victim who gets too close to the bars.

Until December 30 (307 W. 43rd St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-246-4422).


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