"★★★½ - "arresting production… [holds] its audience from start to end"

"[Grapey is a] restless, live wire actor…shakes things up like a soda jerk" – Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

"…scorching writing and riveting interplay… magnificently nuanced"

"…towering tragicomic performance that become forever engraved in memory" – Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

"funny, dark, haunting and sharply-written" – NewCity.com

CHICAGO PREMIERE

October 1 to 31, 2010

The Playwrights Ensemble Talks about Edward Albee

Nicholas Patricca
"I never attended a play until I entered the monastery. The first play I ever saw was Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (You really haven't seen that play until you experience it performed by monks.) The second play I attended was The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, also in the monastery. These two plays, these two playwrights, converted me to the theatre. Thank you, Edward. And, Thank you, Dennis for confirming my conversion. Gratefully, Nicholas "

Nick continues:
“The ‘accidental’ meeting of Peter and Jerry on a bench in Central Park taught me something about the essence of dramatic conflict. Their encounter was for me something like the collision of electrons in a physics experiment in which the electrons escape from the nuclei they normally orbit. Their powerful collision, or mutual repelling and attracting, causes a destruction and a creation which are essential to discovery. In drama this discovery is insight into the human condition which is the true meaning of dramatic action. Albee showed me how the ‘anagnorisis’ of Greek drama could be achieved simply and profoundly in American theatre. When I came to Chicago and experienced Dennis’ masterful direction of Albee (and of Pinter), I knew I had met someone who understood how to make this essential element of theatre present for the audience to contemplate.”

Claudia Allen
“I've taught playwriting for many years and early in every intro class, I assign students to write a scene set on a bench -- two people, a bench, a surprise, revelation and/or reversal in the course of the scene. It forces the student to immediately figure out who these two characters are and what they want, what their relationship to each other is (strangers, lovers....), how their differing points of view provide obstacles, conflict, the juicy stuff of drama, and where the bench is, all those vital details and desires. Two people on a bench sounds so simple but it's as rich and meaningful and even as primal as the writer can make it. Albee in The Zoo Story took most of us on our first journey on a bench, and it was a complex, scary journey, two people talking on a bench.”

Jeffrey Sweet
“Actually, I came to The Zoo Story late. My first exposure to Albee's work was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and at a ludicrously young age. The original production -- with Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon -- was recorded by Columbia Records and released in 1963 as (if memory serves) a four-disc set. It was in the Evanston Public Library, and I must have been a freshman or sophomore in high school when I checked it out. I can only imagine what a librarian must have thought seeing a 13-year-old kid take that out. But I was theatre-mad and I knew it was hot stuff so I had to hear it. I can't imagine that I remotely understood it at that age, though there were some things I could appreciate at the beginning of my search for technique. Every few years I returned to it until my age caught up with me. I'm sure The Zoo Story had a great impact on writers who were old enough when it first was premiered to be blown away by it. But Virginia Woolf was the second canonical play (the first was A Raisin in the Sun) that was exposed to that gave me a taste of how much power could be let loose on a stage. So that was my introduction to Albee. Later, of course, I got to know more of the plays. A Delicate Balance is a particular favorite. Later still, I had the pleasure of getting to know the writer and the compliment of finding he liked my stuff. Of course, some of what my stuff is incorporates DNA from his stuff.”

James Sherman
When I was in graduate school, Edward Albee came to do a guest appearance with the playwrights. It happened to be the opening weekend of my first full-length play, "Magic Time," so Albee came to watch a performance! Afterwards, the first thing he said to me was, "Thanks for the plug." Startled and impressed that he was paying such close attention, I realized he was referring to one moment in the play where one of the characters quoted a line from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. (I figured that would be okay since Albee quotes a Tennessee Williams line from Streetcar Named Desire in Virginia Woolf.) Then Albee said he liked the one character in Magic Time who was the most mysterious. If we've learned anything from Albee, it's that we should retain some mystery about our characters for the audience to wonder about.

Joel D. Johnson
I was eighteen years old when I was first blown away by The Zoo Story and that overwhelming emotional and intellectual attachment to the play has never left me. It was the primer I used to understand what made a good play and great theatre; and how one develops character, one creates intrigue and mystery and shapes a human experience into art.

Lonnie Carter
It was 1965, at Marquette University, and I was on stage for the first time, not my plays on stage, but me on stage, as Jerry in The Zoo Story, the two-hander with opening liner "I've-been-to-the-zoo" for Jerry and Peter, the buttoned-up one. I was supposed to play Peter, about whom Jerry says, "You couldn't even get your wife with a male child", to which Peter's reply is "It's a matter of genetics, not manhood, you…you monster", all before Jerry pulls the outstretched knife held by Peter into his gut, killing himself indeed. Someone dropped out and I got the Jerry part/the Beauty part. We did the play all over Wisconsin and Iowa and all we needed was a bench and someone to turn on a light bulb or two. We played large venues, 500 seats or more and small meeting rooms at Episcopal churches, colleges and universities. Suffice it to say, I learned as much about writing playing Jerry as I've learned anywhere else.

Later, Edward Albee chose my play for a reading series at Lincoln Center in the early 80's when everyone else on the committee wanted to turn my work down. Thank you twice, Mr. Albee.

Return to At Home At The Zoo play page