Volume 3, Issue 14
July 5 - July 21, 2001

Acting Up

Cilicia Yakhlef

PARK BENCH POSTURING
@
THE ZOO STORY

The LIDA Project Theater
2180 Stout Street, 720-837-6863
Th-Sa, 8 pm, $12

God ... is a colored queen who wears a kimono and plucks his eyebrows, who is a woman who cries with determination behind her closed door." So claims Edward Albee's dedicatedly deranged character, Jerry.

Jerry's character falls somewhere between Christ and Antichrist, poet and predator. Jerry is both frightening and pitiable, and yet it is clear from the onset of the play that he is a human being who always holds the upper hand. Vastly intelligent, fearless, eager and demanding, Jerry is fully engaged with life and gloriously pained by that fact. Throughout the dialogue of The Zoo Story, Jerry endeavors to bring Peter into this state of engagement, no matter the cost.

Peter, on the other hand, lives an existence so mundane and sterile he seems heartless and cold, if only through his own emotional lethargy. He is, one might say, the typical work-a-day American man, with a wife, children, parakeets and cats. He regularly escapes to the park, where he sits on his favorite bench and anonymously reads.

It is this serene tableau Peter reading quietly on his bench which Jerry incipiently invades. Like a chilly draft that hisses somewhere outside the senses of an otherwise warm, deep sleep, Jerry insistently breaks into the comfortable afternoon Peter has built for himself on the bench.

The ensuing dialogue is thick with juxtaposed paradigms and ideals. Jerry calls himself a "permanent transient," while Peter describes his blissfully one-dimensional domestic serenity. Jerry tells Peter, "Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly." It is the mission statement of the play, and Albee executes it perfectly.

Edward Albee has won three Pulitzer Prizes as a playwright. Although he was adopted into a life of privilege, Albee's genius for dialogue affects a genuine dialect of the various subcultures which Albee endeavors to expose. His characters aren't heavily outlined, there aren't extensive character traits listed within the manuscript of the play. Rather, the characters reveal themselves through dialogue, an effect that generally comes across well to the audience in spite of any problems which might plague the production.

This particular staging does display Albee's talents adequately, but there are some problems with the Roundfish production. First and foremost would be the lighting. The play is set in Central Park on a sunny Summer afternoon. For whatever reason, director Nolan Patterson's use of lighting creates an aesthetic more akin to moonlit solitude in a sea of black ink. Problematic in most cases extremely problematic when the script directly disagrees with the lighting design.

Furthermore, in instances such as these, the director can alter the flow of dramatic tension. In other words, imagine your own level of discomfort in speaking with a stranger whilst sitting in a park in broad daylight, as opposed to the tension you might feel speaking with a stranger (who gets stranger and stranger) at, say, midnight in a deserted park.

The audience, not privy to Albee's set directions, likely was misdirected into a fearful tension far more quickly than the playwright intended, due to this misdirection of lighting design. In other words, directors should stick to the script. Playwrights who have won three Pulitzers (and playwrights who haven't) know the impact of what they've written and they generally know how they want it staged. Directors who claim artistic freedom in altering the playwright's intentions are best advised to be sure their genius exceeds that of the playwright. Not the case here. As an actor, Patterson did a fine job portraying Jerry, although the performance was greatly inhibited by the lack of effective blocking and engaging movement. When delivering a three-page monologue one must do a little more than stand still if one expects to engage the audience, even when the monologue itself is intense. Again this is a directorial call, but the actor was also the director, so point the finger where you will.

Stephen Tobias as Peter played a flatlined, whitebread dozer quite well, although I would really have liked to have seen some more depth to the characterization. Whitebread can be played with panache, and to my thinking, that's the way the part was written. The contrast between "vegetable" and "animal" would have been heightened if Tobias' vegetable portrayal of Peter had displayed more color and evoked more flavor.

The play is not without its merits. The characters affect the dialogue sufficiently to bring the intention of the playwright to light (what little of it there is). Considering the absurd yet current nature of this extremely well written piece, that alone makes it worth seeing. C Cilicia Yakhlef