Peter and Jerry
Second Stage, New York
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Edward Albee’s Zoo Story is one of the classics of American theater, said Linda Winer in Newsday. When “the one-act bombshell” debuted in 1958, its searing attack on the hypocrisies of postwar culture immediately announced a powerful new voice. Now the 80-year-old Albee has done something unimaginable, revisiting the work that made him famous and radically transforming it. The Zoo Story, in which a buttoned-down book editor seated on a park bench is harangued by a shaggy, truth-speaking vagrant, now forms the second act of Peter and Jerry. A new first act, Homelife, traces the suffocating domestic life of tweedy Peter, whom the original play didn’t tell us much about. The combination of old and new is “a thoroughly satisfying package of jagged-edged provocation” that genuinely seems written to be a single play.
“Homelife isn’t just an addendum to The Zoo Story,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. It’s a tightly conceived play that directly tackles the shortcoming of many modern marriages. Peter is played by Bill Pullman, “the ideal interpreter of the diffident Albee man who is brutally surprised by what lurks within him,” while Johanna Day portrays his wife, Ann, in what may be “her breakout role.” An air of menace gradually rises in their tense dialogue, which finds its release in the searing speeches of The Zoo Story. As the vagrant Jerry, Dallas Roberts “generates electric friction as man fearing and longing to make contact with someone, or something, outside himself.” Not just his words but his body language and even his eye movements are unsettling.
“Improbable as it sounds, the new stuff doesn’t just hold up” next to the classic Zoo Story, said Jeremy McCarter in New York. “It’s better.” Homelife is a confident work by a mature artist capable of rendering both male and female characters and providing glimpses into the darker aspects of their deeper lives. Albee’s name is already on a shortlist of great American playwrights, but as he approaches the end of his career, this octogenarian “is doing what Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Thornton Wilder all failed to do: finish strong.”
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