"Zoo Story' at Society Hill Playhouse

Who's Edward Albee afraid of?
(Women, mostly)

ROBERT ZALLER

F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that there are no second acts in American lives. That celebrated dictum couldn’t apply more pertinently than to Edward Albee, who has been living off his first act, the work from The Zoo Story to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that made him famous nearly 50 years ago. The once-prolific Albee has hardly written anything worth watching in decades; and his most recent play— The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?— may be the worst play ever professionally produced in America.

The Society Hill Playhouse revival of The Zoo Story gives us a chance to see what all the fuss was about in the first place. The plot is simple to the point of banality: Jerry, who lives in a flophouse, accosts Peter, a family man who is reading peacefully on a Central Park bench (this play really does take place a long while ago). It is a seduction in reverse, for Jerry wants to bully and provoke Peter into being the agent of his suicide. The play is thus about despair, but the gay subtext— shocking at the end of the ’50s— is both less and more important now: less, because the theater has assimilated every variant of gay sensibility; and more, because Jerry’s aggression, so existentially threatening when the play was new, seems more like just rough trade today. In short, The Zoo Story has grown dated.

Repressed sexuality, pre-Kinsey

Albee gives his game away when Jerry “confesses” that, for ten glorious days at age 15, he was a homosexual— the word is spelled out in caps. Since then, he assures Peter, he has been straight but unable to love any woman more than once. His women consequently remain anonymous, with the exception of Jerry’s blowsy landlady, whose sexual advances disgust and repel him. When Jerry isn’t fending her off he is coping with her dog, who invariably attacks him as well and whom he attempts to poison, clearly as a surrogate for his master.

The Zoo Story’s first audience was intended to take this lengthy exposition at face value, while gays in the know would decipher the code, i.e., Jerry’s despair was the result of his repressed sexuality, or his story was simply a come-on to Peter. But nowadays, post-Kinsey and post-AIDS, gay sexuality needn’t be either tragic or traumatic, and it certainly isn’t in the closet— not, at least, in Central Park.

Albee’s woman problem

What that leaves us with is what Albee’s text is shot with through and through: his hatred of women. It is the same theme that animates The Goat, in which a man leaves his wife for an animal. The great gay playwrights have given us some of our most extraordinary insights into the female heart, but Albee, in the last analysis, simply registers his disgust. When it comes down to it, he would rather fuck a goat than a woman, and he more easily relates to a dog. That is his privilege, of course, but it does not make for entertaining theater if one does not share his predilections, or even perhaps if one does.

Gene D’Alessandro’s Jerry is suitably menacing, and more humanized than Jerry probably deserves to be, while Michael Cairns’s Peter plays the Albee straight man, in both senses of the term. Together they make the best case for the play; what they can’t conceal are its fundamental flaws. Steven A. Wright directed.

The bill includes Jonathan Reynolds’ brief Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey . . ., supposedly a spoof on the social climbing of the young Rupert Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch was young?). The cast tries hard, but Tintern Abbey is, I’m afraid, the other way.