‘Zoo Story’ is intense drama
Published 6:58 am Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Watch a time bomb explode. See New Space’s “The Zoo Story” by Edward Albee. I’m still picking up the pieces.
The year was 1958. It was a time when mainstream America was schizophrenic. Half was set on storybook family life: a stay at home mom, college educated dad with a white collar job, two kids; etcetera. Half was left out, lonely, desperate, alienated. For them, the American Dream was a torment and daily reminder of their own misery.
It’s against that backdrop that “Zoo” unfolds in an intense, psychological one act involving two strangers who meet on a sunny day in Central Park, New York City. One talks. One listens. Not an awful lot of anything else goes on. Yet, the bifurcated state of mind in 1958 gets worked in along with an uncomfortable foreboding of something terrible about to happen. The intent is a clear message and merciless suspense.
And New Space gets both.
Jason Adkins captivates as Jerry, the talker.
Jerry lives alone in a miserable, four story walk up. The other tenants are colorful but misfits. Jerry doesn’t have a dime to his name, spends his days re-living his life of pain and confusion since childhood and roaming the streets aimlessly
All of which Adkins gets out in monologues and speeches that would test the memory of any actor and in body language that makes you suffer, laugh and marvel along with him. Lapses, there are. But they are few and far between and no where near enough to detract from the hypnotic, absorbing power of Adkins’ performance. He takes hold and takes over.
Todd Szekely blew me away as Vince in New Space’s first time out with “Tape” and this time with his version of a different kind of dysfunction: that of Peter, the anal-retentive listener.
Peter’s a publishing executive, married with two girls and parakeets and cats as household pets. He’s neat to a T, reserved to the point of paralysis, informed as well as readers of Time magazine can be and starts out totally oblivious to Jerry’s world or, for that matter, to much of any of the world outside his own impeccably organized life. He would be content to sit reading on his favorite bench in Central Park by himself but is too repressed to stop Jerry from intruding on his privacy. He puts up with Jerry, listens, takes in and internalizes. All of which registers in Shekel’s easy-to-read face and shifts in body position on the bench.
The overall effect of Jerry on Peter so communicates as to keep you guessing about who is going to do what next. It’s an uncomfortable tension that tightens as suspense builds and not unlike watching a time bomb tick until, inevitably, it explodes.
This is dynamite theater by a major American playwright, still living. It is formatted in real time; which is to say, the time on stage is the time that the action would take to happen. It is relevant, insightful and explosive. If you haven’t seen it before, the climactic scene will blow you away. If you have, New Space won’t let you down. The actors and Chris Fisher’s directing are on the money.
Reactions? Comments? E-mail Dale Burrows at grayghost7@comcast.net.
