Edward Albee's curmudgeonly decision to affix an addendum, written in 2004, to his career-making one-act play, The Zoo Story, written in 1959, shouldn't be surprising. Far from solving mysteries probed for over five decades by learned scholars and acting-class students alike, though, his revision only further muddies the expository waters.
In the earlier play, preppyish Peter is enjoying a sunny afternoon's read on a park bench, when he is accosted by scruffy Jerry, who recounts a Dostoyevskian tale of spiritual awakening engendered by his attempt to poison his landlady's dog. As Peter reels under the contradictions of this disclosure, Jerry proceeds to taunt him mercilessly before brandishing a street knife. Soon Peter finds himself transformed into an unwilling accomplice to the suicide foreshadowed in the opening remarks.
What would cause a mild-mannered textbook publisher to be drawn into a duel to the death against an aggressor obviously bent on provoking a confrontation? Albee's prequel reveals that Peter's pastoral surroundings are his escape from an unsettling discussion initiated by his wife. They are too happy, Ann complains, too content—the gentleness that makes him a good husband and father lacks the passion and excitement she craves. Lamenting her inability to do more than "think about thinking about" something daring, she insists that they get in touch with the "animal" inside them. Even after Peter confesses to once giving way to his primal instincts, to the point of inflicting sexual abuse upon an undeserving victim, the mate he has vowed to cherish and protect continues to mock the remorse from whence his restraint springs.
When two males are facing off for dominance, we expect one of them to eventually turn on his attacker—but while a woman demanding to be apache-danced tooth-and-claw might have been acceptable in 2004, we in 2014 are as repulsed by the idea of cave-man canoodling as is Peter, who chooses to retreat to what he anticipates will be civilized peace and quiet.
Director Steve Scott avoids the potential unease inherent in his text through Peter and Jerry's contrasting facial hair, and by prefacing the show with lectures on behavior among the lesser species. This leaves Ann with little to do except to dither with the dogged persistence of spouses accustomed to their remarks going unheeded. Ted Hoerl, Mike Cherry, and Elaine Carlson deliver uniformly impeccable line readings for this City Lit production but can't render Albee's perverse footnote anything but a point of contention to ponder for another half-century.
